Husbandry

The Faith of Columbus

2012-02-12T15:58:00.000-08:00

On September 13, 1501, Christopher Columbus wrote a letter to Father Gaspar Gorricio who resided at the Monastery of Santa Maria de Las Cuevas near Seville. With this letter, Columbus also provided a copy of a manuscript that he had prepared compiling several scriptures (over 100 pages of them) and sayings from early church fathers. This manuscript has become known as Columbus’s Book of Prophecies.

What stands out more than anything else in this volume is Columbus’s profound sense of personal destiny. His stated motivation for writing it was to convince the Spanish crown to free Mount Zion and Jerusalem. And so he argues that the hundreds of scriptural references to other people, to non-Israelite nations, to islands of the seas, etc. were all predictions of the rulers’ noble work.

Of course Columbus also saw himself in these prophecies. In fact it is hard to imagine that he saw much more than himself in them, even if he apparently made his argument for the king and queen’s benefit alone. Columbus’s biographers have been quite clear through the years that the Genoese explorer had an ego to match his determination. The Book of Prophecies might be understood as just another example of this inflated self-regard.

But I think that this would be a mistake. The book, if it implies that ancient holy men actually saw Columbus or knew of him, also sheds a good deal of light on the sincerity of the explorer’s faith. In fact, it sheds an interesting and important light on his understanding of what the word faith actually means. For Columbus, it was faith that enabled him to fulfill the many scriptural prophecies that he believed were referring to himself.

Columbus writes: “Everyone who heard about my enterprise rejected it with laughter and ridicule… Only Your Highness had faith and perseverance. Who could doubt that this flash of understanding was the work of the Holy Spirit, as well my own? The Holy Spirit illuminated his holy and sacred Scripture, encouraging me in a very strong and clear voice from the forty-four books of the Old Testament, the four evangelists, and twenty-three epistles from the blessed apostles, urging me to proceed. Continually, without ceasing a moment, they insisted that I go on.”

Columbus then proceeds to admit that he is not a highly educated man (although it is clear that he was no ignorant man either) and that he has sinned greatly in his life. Yet every time that he made mistakes, he was forgiven of the Lord. Then he proceeds.

“This is what I want to record here in order to remind Your Highness and so that you can take pleasure from the things that I am going to tell you about Jerusalem on the basis of the same authority. If you have faith in this enterprise, you will certainly have the victory… Remember, Your Highnesses, that with very little money you undertook the reconquest [sic] of the kingdom of Granada. The working out of all things has been left by Our Lord to individual free will, although he advises many.”

It is hard for modern historians to speak convincingly of such religious conviction. It is much easier for them to understand Columbus’s will for power, recognition and wealth. And yet, even allowing for a great deal of hyperbole in the Book of Prophecies, one cannot discount the priority of religious faith in the explorer’s life. Columbus had a great deal of self-esteem. He also had a great deal of faith in sacred texts. Understanding the combination of both in his mind (that these texts had predicted his role in sacred history) gives a much better insight into his personality than do so many secular arguments that fill our current curricula.

What makes this insight so compelling is that it stands as one of the great examples in the history of the world of the power of a certain kind of faith. For Columbus, this faith involved an understanding of the God of the Bible. It also involved his belief that his own life was known to God and was, in fact, accepted by Him to fulfill His divine pre-ordained plan. Furthermore, this faith was based on a free will that effects the “working out of things”.

This is almost a textbook example of the kind of faith described in the Lectures on Faith. There is the recognition of God and an understanding of His attributes. There is the recognition that one’s life is being lived in accordance to divine will. There is also the under-lying base of faith as the principle of action.

For Latter-day Saints who hold the Lectures on Faith in such high regard (in fact most of the book was written by Joseph Smith with input from Sidney Rigdon) this is evidence that Columbus was a man of great faith. Of course this is confirmed in The Book of Mormon where a clear reference to Columbus indicates that the “Spirit of God” rested upon him and led him to the Americas.

This is also a remarkable confirmation of Joseph Smith’s teaching about faith. Joseph, almost certainly, had no access to the Book of Prophecies and yet there could be no better fit of his understanding of faith than Columbus’s autobiographical account. This is all the more remarkable because The Book of Mormon leaves no room to doubt that the Genoese sailor was a man of divine destiny. This is a powerful testimony of both Joseph Smith and Christopher Columbus. It is also a benchmark for understanding that very misunderstood principle of faith.

This kind of faith is not a wishy-washy belief system. Neither is it a misinformed or gullible zeal. One might not believe in Columbus’s God, but it’s hard not to believe that Columbus believed in himself. The problem for nonbelievers is the recognition that Columbus would not have accomplished what he did without his particular kind of faith. And one of the profound messages of this kind of faith is that it is immensely powerful and that it comes with a big dose of self-knowledge.

In a world plagued with artificial causes and self-doubt, Columbus has much to teach us. He almost compels us to ask the self-penetrating question of whether personal understanding is possible without faith. In a post-Darwin world there aren’t many other choices on which we might anchor ourselves. Either we arrive at a tenuous self-fulfillment through competitive survival, or we develop our own gifts in the service of God. This simple dichotomy is perhaps the main reason that Columbus is so out of fashion these days.
References

The University of California Press (Berkeley) has recently published a series of texts on Columbus. Volume III (1997), The Book of Prophecies Edited by Christopher Columbus (edited by Roberto Rusconi and translated by Blair Sullivan) is my source. Carol Delaney’s book Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem was published last year (2011) by Free Press. My copy of Lectures on Faith was published by Bookcraft. The reference to Columbus in The Book of Mormon is in 1 Nephi 13:12.

Not All Composts Are the Same

2012-01-29T14:15:00.001-08:00

Not all composts are the same. I know this sounds obvious, but I recently did a little experiment anyway just to see for myself. Last summer, I found myself back in the Sierra Nevada of California camping at an elevation of maybe 7,000 feet. We were near an impressive grove of old red firs. By the parking area I noticed that a pile of soil had fallen from the forest above an exposed bank of earth. It was dark and rich, very different than the pale dirt of the exposed bank. When I looked closer at the forest I realized that the soil was a thick matting of decomposing fir needles. It was then that I decided to conduct my little experiment.

I gathered a bag of the soil and took it home. Then I went looking for another large grove of trees with a thick and naturally composted soil. I found it near the San Joaquin River north of Fresno under some very large California sycamores. Finally, I gathered some of my own backyard compost made of yard leaves and kitchen scraps – pretty much a mix of everything urbanely biodegradable.

I then cleared a small area in the garden at the end of the summer and spread the three kinds of composts next to each other. Then I purchased a couple of varieties of lettuce and placed each one in the three composts. By Thanksgiving time, they were big enough to eat and I was ready to see if my little experiment would have anything meaningful to show for itself. I wanted to see if different kinds of soil would grow plants that tasted noticeably different.

In a way this seems fairly obvious, at least to serious gardeners. We, who have grown our own food for any amount of time, know quite well that a home-grown vegetable almost always tastes better than the same vegetable purchased from a supermarket. But being the experimentalist that I am, I wanted to see for myself in a direct comparison.

And I knew I would have a good chance to run a blind experiment on Thanksgiving. Erik and Tabitha were coming for the holiday and so were Alton and Bonnie (Kathy’s parents). They all agreed to participate in my little study. First, I cut enough of the lettuce for each of us to taste samples from each kind of compost. Then I arranged them so that only I would know which kind was which.

Almost immediately my participants could tell a difference in taste. Then Tabitha and Erik noticed a slight difference in smell too. Bonnie and Alton both came to the same conclusion. The lettuce grown in red fir and sycamore soils had a stronger bitter taste than the lettuce grown in the yard compost.

We decided that this might be caused by the more acid nature of the fir and sycamore soils. That’s my running hypothesis for the time being. In any event, the experiment was worthwhile. The differences were quite apparent. And it also made me think about soils in a broader context.

We truly are what we eat, and the things that we eat are made of the very substances of where they grow. Native animals and plants are not the only things that are tied to specific places. People are too. We don’t normally stop to consider what this means though. A typical day of a typical American involves eating food from all around the world – from soils that have no influence of any kind in purchasing decisions. We eat the food from cheap and expensive restaurants (and pseudo-restaurants) without an agronomic care in the world. I think this is bit naïve.

And I admit that I am mostly naïve myself on such issues. We should do better. Maybe we like the idea of owning an international body; fed, that is, from around the world. The only trouble with this thinking is that we really don’t know what it means. Does it mean that we are corporally (even viscerally) generic? I hope not. I expect that it partly means that we live in cages. The only internationally nourished animals that I know of are either kept in zoos or are otherwise domesticated and fed by humans. Wild animals all find their food locally.

But maybe I’m taking my little lettuce experiment too far. I’m not sure. Certainly “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [my] philosophy”. But then again, Hamlet was talking about heaven and earth. And so am I.

A Raven's Wire Nest

2012-01-09T17:45:00.000-08:00

There used to be a bird nest in the basement of the Bean Museum. It wasn’t built around a light fixture or above an exposed truss, nor was it made of twigs and lined with feathers. It was positioned artistically behind display glass in the hall outside of the auditorium, and it was made of carefully interwoven lengths of barbed wire. Mounted guardedly atop the whole was an erstwhile relative (now stuffed) of the former engineer: a raven.

You have to love a bird that can make a house from a dilapidated fence. There’s a bit of spite in the act, and maybe a sense of raw survival too. In a spare land, one learns to be resourceful – whether that one be a bird or a human being. But how could such a thing be done? At some point the raven had to drag, bend and otherwise maneuver a long heavy wire into an available tree. Presumably it had to fly to the chosen branches with the metal in its beak.

Ornithologists have been telling us for years that corvids are smarter than we think. Maybe all it takes is for one of them to be large enough and strong enough (like a raven) so that hefting a piece of decomposing fence into a home becomes inevitable. What would an elephant-sized magpie be capable of doing?

But there is also a timeless propriety in the subordination of a modern technology to a wild creature. It makes one pause to consider the fate of our own constructs. To what use might a feral species make of a computer, for example.

The power chord is, no doubt, easier to nidify than barbed wire. And maybe the circuits could warm frail nestlings when the sun is low in the horizon. A more likely use would be as a parasol for kangaroo rats. Eventually though, the miraculous innovations of decades to come, just like those of decades past, will be piled into heaps and left for the penetrating roots of organisms that are better adapted to live in raven-inhabiting austerity.

Unless, of course, we decide to adapt to a landscape that can keep us. Or, to put it more accurately: unless we learn to live sustainably where we are. Let our technologies come and go. Some people will get rich from them and others won’t. But most of the technologies themselves will not endure. Unless we are wise enough to treat them much like a disposable fence, our dependence on them may become too great. Human beings, just like ravens, can’t ultimately make a life from a rusted wire.

What we need is a soil that will sustain us for a thousand years. You may wonder what is so special about a thousand years. A lot of things are actually. You see, in a thousand years the only people left on Planet Earth will be those that are living on sustainable soil. This might be a handful of hunter-gatherers who wander in search of whatever the post-apocalyptic earth has to offer. Or it might be a world filled with our descendants living on a land that feeds them, because they have learned how to feed it.

Our traditions include a belief in a future Millennium when we will live in peace and harmony. Some of us have interpreted this to mean that a magical transformation will suddenly eliminate all evil and suffering from the world. If we have destroyed the land because of greed or of ignorance or even war, surely a divine providence will make it all better, or so we seem to assume.

I disagree. My millennial expectations are more in line with those of Brigham Young who insisted that “When we have streets paved with gold, we will place it there ourselves”.

Much of our confusion revolves around a misunderstood word in the Creation account found in the first chapter of Genesis (verse 28). “And God blessed them [referring to Adam and Eve] and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” The same command was repeated to Noah after the Flood (see Genesis 9:1).

What are we to make of this word replenish? In many exegeses it is understood to mean reproduce. In fact all three injunctions are understood this way: be fruitful, multiply, and replenish. In this view mankind is commanded to have a lot of descendants and this is all the scripture means. I’m not convinced that this is correct. Having a family is certainly a big part of the verse, but I doubt that it is all that is meant.

In my Oxford English Dictionary (Compact Edition) replenish has ten definitions. Only one of the ten means to occupy with people (Definition 6). The others are transitive verbs referring to filling up or stocking with something. Definition 7 specifically refers to filling with food. Definition 10 means increase.

The overall sense of replenishing is to provide an abundance of something. In reference to a viable place like the earth, it carries the sense of fertility and health. As it refers to people it refers to that which sustains people: the soil, the water, the air. In reference to the earth the command requires that mankind make it abundant with life. It is a command to assume stewardship of the planet.

And, in fact, this is what the raven is doing in its own way on top of its barbed-wire nest. It is taking a lifeless length of wire and using it to give life. The raven, it seems, is filling the measure of its creation. What about us? Are we doing the same?

Sadly, I think, the answer is no. The posterity of Adam and Eve are expected to do more than just reproduce. If that is all we do, and then over-extract the life-giving resources of our world, we then become no more than the animal creation – intent only on increasing our Darwinian fitness. Actually we are worse than this. If we only use our super-natural intelligence for Darwinian ends, we will (and do) cause much harm. And, ironically, this is a mindset that will destroy the world.

Only humans, in harmony with the gifts of Creation, can make a fallen world a garden. The desert can blossom as the rose, but it can only do so over time if soil is built up and water is used wisely. These are gifts that we give back to the earth, not as beasts, but as divinely inspired and responsible stewards. Gardening is an act of the Children of God. On the other hand, ruthless (“limitless”) extraction is a Faustian game that never ends well for mortals.

So what is the human equivalent of the opportunistic raven? How do we replenish the earth amidst the piles of multi-generational refuse? I think that each one of us is left to answer this question ourselves. But while you’re thinking about it, I’m going to go out back, find my man-made pitchfork, and turn over my compost pile.

Notes

Thanks to the M.L. Bean Staff at BYU for the raven picture. I am also indebted to Wendell Berry’s insightful piece in Harper’s Magazine: Faustian Economics: Hell hath no Limits (May, 2008). Brigham Young’s quote is from Discourses of Brigham Young by John a Widtsoe (page 29).

Growing Tomatoes on Cinderblocks

2011-12-24T05:53:00.000-08:00

I kept a couple of tomato plants in an unusual way this year. Instead of bracing them with the usual wire frames or wooden trellises I used cinderblocks. That’s right, I borrowed a few of those weathered gray cement blocks from other places in the yard (bought a few extras) and piled them loosely around the plants.

There was a reason for this. I wanted to see if they would work as a stone mulch while at the same time provide support for the notoriously recumbent plants. They weren’t the most beautiful of gardening props early in the season (later in the year they were completely covered), but the overall experience was such a success that I am certainly going to repeat the experiment this next year.

I started by shoveling a nice layer of homemade compost around the young transplants and then placed 4-inch thick cinderblocks – flat side down – around the plants and over the compost. This was basically a stone mulch except that the “stones” where extra thick and had a big opening between the bottom and the top. By placing them this way, I was hoping to retain ground moisture around the plants, but I didn’t want to restrict air movement. The blocks were perfect for this.

As the plants grew, I started placing other cinderblocks on top of the first ones. These I placed with the open side down in order to make the wall higher. This worked well for a few weeks but then the plants began growing more rapidly than expected. In order to keep the leaves off of the ground, I was forced to both raise the block layer (by adding more blocks) and add another wall of bricks adjacent to the first wall. As the season progressed, even this outer wall was completely over-grown.

The result of all of this exceeded my expectations. Because I didn’t use any artificial fertilizers (just my compost layer) the plants produced both an abundance of vegetative growth as well as a good fruit set. The two plants that I kept ended up covering about 100 square feet and reaching five feet high. I had a veritable thicket of tomato plants and yet almost none of the leaves were touching the ground. As a result, there was virtually no disease on any of the leaves the entire season. When I finally took out the plants (a week before the first frost in November) there were still hundreds of blossoms and developing fruit on the vines.

What surprised me most as I cleaned up the blocks was how dry it was around the base of the plants. This in spite of the fact that the area had received regular water (via the sprinklers) all season, and the canopy was lush and very full. It seems that the blocks had indeed kept the area well aerated even as they supported the plants. But they also kept the ground around the tomatoes from getting hot and the soil, just below the surface, was moist. Earthworms and other soil creatures were abundant.

I should also mention that the stems were thicker than I remember tomato stems to be. Normally when the branches are left to tumble to the ground, they tend to grow roots where they come in contact with the soil. My tomatoes were not allowed to do this. As a result, their stems were as thick as a silver dollar (thicker actually) like tomato plants that are grown in production greenhouses. I have no doubt that if there were to be no killing frosts, these tomatoes would have kept producing for months to come.

The Meaning of Faith in the Gospel of John

2011-12-15T18:24:00.000-08:00

Some time ago I decided to look into what the Apostle John had to say about faith. I turned to the Topical Guide, found the appropriate page and discovered that there was nothing there. There were references to faith in each of the other gospels, and in many of Paul’s epistles, but not a single entry for the fourth gospel.

This surprised me and disappointed me at the same time. Faith is a doctrine I often ponder. And the Gospel of John is one of my favorite places to find answers. How could this very insightful man have nothing to say about the first principle of the gospel? It bothered me.

Then I decided to look under the heading for belief. And again I was surprised. Just like before, I found several references in the synoptic gospels and in the epistles. But there was a difference when I looked at the listings for John. Instead of nothing, or just a few, there were dozens, and they took up well over an entire column. In fact there were more references than for all of the other gospels combined.

This relieved me but it also puzzled me. What was the reason for this change? Was there a big difference between these two principles (of faith and belief) of the gospel that John had recorded? If so, it seemed to me that the frequency of the listings would have been the other way around. Why did John have more to say about belief than he did about faith?

I was about to learn that he didn’t. As I looked deeper into the subject, I was to discover that John had very much to say about faith. In fact his gospel and epistles are among the greatest records we have in all of World literature on this pivotal doctrine of Christ. But you have to read his writings in Greek to understand this.

The important Greek word is pisteuw which is a verb referring to faith. The trouble that translators have is that the word faith in English is a noun. A rare verbal form of faith does exist but it is awkward. To translate pisteuw more literally requires adding an auxiliary verb, something like exercising faith. But this can also be cumbersome. What is not apparent in most languages is that John does not refer to faith as a noun. He only uses it as a verb, but the verb is not translated as faith. It is translated as to believe.

Very often this word (to believe) worked well. At other times, though, it introduced a subtle change of doctrine that plagues us to this day. The long process of diluting faith from a profoundly life focusing first principle of the gospel to the passive or indifferent nod of today largely begins with this early awkward translation of pisteuw.

Consider, for example, the beloved verse in Chapter 3 (verse 16): “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoseover believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life”. Now this verse is one of the great treasures of the English language. To change it would seem profane. But it has clearly been misunderstood through the centuries.

It strains the imagination to think that Christ is here admitting the uninterested sluggard, who guesses that he believes in God, into His kingdom. But if this is not what John is telling us, what are we to understand from this verse? What does this pisteuw mean that rewards its possessor with everlasting life?

To answer this question requires that we look at how John uses pisteuw. And a good place to start is in the first chapter of his gospel. This is where he presents the panoramic view of Christ that begins with the unremembered past and the Creation of life. It identifies Christ (the Word) with the cosmic order as the great bearer of light.

“In him was life; and the life was the light of men” (Verse 4). “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (Verse 5). And then note Verse 7. “This same [John] came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all men through him might believe”.

This is the light that is given to “every man that cometh into the world” (Verse 9). And yet not all men continue in this God-given light. “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of god, even to them that believe [pisteuosin] on his name” (Verse 12).

So here we have a vital clue as to what John means by pisteuw. It means comprehending the light of Christ, continuing in it, receiving Him.

Another important element of John’s faith is that the Holy Ghost will be manifest by those who have this faith. In Chapter 7 we learn that living water will flow from those that believe, and this living water is the Holy Ghost. In contrast, those without this belief (pisteuosin) deny that the holy spirit can quicken our understanding and give life (6:64).

These are two powerful images of pistis - manifestly more profound in a hot sunny Mediterranean climate like Palestine. Life giving light and rivers of water cut to the heart of mankind’s vital needs. If we translate pistis either as faith or as believing without this vital dependence, we have missed the core of what John wants us to understand.

But there is more in this remarkable book. One of the important doctrinal contributions that John makes regarding pistis is that it is not to be understood as something different than knowledge. One can have both faith and knowledge at the same time. In fact we should aspire to this dual understanding of God.

In the great High Priestly prayer Christ thanks the Father that his disciples have received his “word and known them and have believed [episteusan] that thou hast sent me” (17:8).

In Chapter 6 (verse 69) Peter indicates that he and the other apostles “have believed and have known that thou art the Christ”. And again in Chapter 10 (verse 38) Jesus tells the Jews that they should at least believe His works, “that ye may know and believe”.

In a scientific age where knowledge is so valued and so little understood and where the expert and the specialist are more honored than an experienced farmer or a devoted mother, this may be hard to comprehend. We have come to believe, somehow, that faith and knowledge are either opposites or at least mutually exclusive values. How can someone have both faith and knowledge at the same time?

John would have thought the question ridiculous. For him, faith is its own form of knowledge. Faith is not a tentative belief system that comes from wishful thinking. It is a motivating inner light that comes from experiencing the power of God in one’s life. Faith is the basic element in the Redeemer’s Plan of Happiness.

Which brings me to one more insight from John: his understanding that faith is the path to truth. Truth is not a single “a ha” moment of discovery that acknowledges a new insight and is never doubted again. The way to truth is rather a continuous path of following the Light of Christ.

“Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, if ye continue in my word,” that is, continue in pistis, “then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (Chapter 8:31-32 ). Here, indeed, is a view of truth very different from the one used in our empirical world. It is also a perspective that helps us understand Christ’s silence before Pilate.

Remember that the Roman ruler asked Christ, “what is truth,” and that the question went unanswered. Pilate wanted a definition that he could spell out. He wanted a logical construct. But Christ’s truth is not so easily defined. It comes from faith. It comes from pistis. And this faith is based on an understanding of light and the Holy Ghost. Truth for John is knowledge that comes from the experienced journey of this faith.

For Pilate, who lacked this experience and lacked the light of truth, a short dictionary definition would not do. He was not capable of understanding. It would be like describing the taste of chocolate to a child that had never eaten it.

The greatest truths in life are like this. They involve the deep yearnings of the soul and the profound joy of finding divine truth. Religious ritual is an acknowledgment of this important silence. And this is also the lesson that John wants us to learn.

He couldn’t bring himself to tell us about faith as a static noun - as a mere mental place-holder of beliefs. To John, faith (pistis) is a silent active taxis towards truth. It is the cardinal response to light. It is the first principle of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Sierra Juniper

2011-11-24T08:06:00.001-08:00

The Sierra juniper (Juniperus occidentalis, also known as the Western juniper) is the most impressive tree of its kind. It grows up to 60 feet tall in cold and wind-swept austerity high among the boulders of alpine forests. In the northern part of its range (throughout Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Northern California) it manages nicely at mid-elevations. But in the Central Sierra it is primarily a tree of the high country, preferring elevations from 7,000 feet right up to the thin air where trees no longer grow.

Sixty feet may not seem all that noteworthy in a land where other trees regularly grow over 200 feet. But this is a perspective of arm-chair naturalists. The giant conifers of the West, for all their magnificence, are trees that grow at lower elevations. The record-setting redwoods of California and Oregon are coastal species that drink in the mist of a vaporous sea. Even the mid-level species above the Central Valley enjoy plenty of water and a moderate clime.

The land of the Sierra juniper, however, is no such place. Most of the year freezing temperatures are typical, at least at night. And when a storm blows in, it often comes with blasts of wind and water. The life-giving snowstorms in this country not only leave a blanket of crystalline white on the forest floor but also a residual reminder plastered to the sides of trees. In such an environment it seems counter-intuitive that stately and long-lived beings ever thrive. But thrive they do, and often in grand style.

Perhaps the most famous Sierra juniper is the Bennett Juniper of Deadman Creek. It is 2,000 to 3,000 years old and its crown, over 85 feet above ground, is aging but strong. At its base, the tree is almost 13 feet wide. It is old and wise - most of its relatives are much younger - only several hundreds of years old. But these passing seasons should not be minimized. Survivors up here are not coddled into longevity, they earn it.

These trees have stories to tell of week-long winds and deep winter snows. They have learned how to capture the life source of the sun while enduring the pinioning of heavy winter ice - sometimes doing both at the same time. Theirs is a story of growth in spite of storms and their gnarled frames are grim reminders of the price that comes from living above the world.

On some of their branches - sometimes hidden and sometimes extending out in obvious proffer - are small round juniper berries. These are not soft sweet fruits that you might expect from a typical berry. In fact they are not true berries at all, but rather the tart woodsy cones of wild conifers. And they are small (about the size of small peas) and look nothing at all like pine cones. Unofficially they are called berry cones. In most kinds of junipers they are light blue or reddish brown. In the Sierra juniper, however, they are dark bluish gray with a soft waxy patina. But their pungency is just as distinct as their more famous relatives.

Crushed just lightly, juniper berry cones are loved by Northern Europeans as a wild-land spice for pork, beef or game birds. The flavoring is also used in gin and others blend it with garlic or rosemary. Yet most English-speaking countries are not familiar with this taste, which is too bad. A few crushed berry cones blended with olive oil and a touch of honey give a purposeful delectation to a Sunday roast.

At 9,000 feet, however, Sierra junipers feed very few of us. Their primary patrons are the alpine corvids that caw their defiant plaints from tree to tree. Watch closely as a Clark’s nutcracker plucks a berry cone with its beak and rolls it deftly back and forth. Then, if it is deemed acceptable, it tips its head back and gulps it down.

The High Sierra is a land of blizzards and lightning storms, and junipers bear the scars of both. Young resilient branches are often bent for months under snow or away from relentless winds. But as trees get older the suppleness ends and new growth becomes rigid. The contortions of wind and snow are locked in place leaving a record of battles endured.

Because of this old Sierra junipers do not flex rhythmically to Aeolian harps like timber lower down. Over a century ago, John Muir would write euphorically of his experience climbing a lower-elevation conifer in a gusty wind storm. He held to the upper canopy for hours as the tree swayed back and forth, breathing the sea and coastal air that had come from so many miles away. He was not in a juniper.

In fact Muir notes in the same essay that “There are two trees in the Sierra forests that are never blown down, so long as they continue in sound health. These are the Juniper and the Dwarf Pine of summit peaks… The burly juniper, whose girth sometimes more than equals its height, is about as rigid as the rocks on which it grows.” The roots, clinging immovably to granite boulders; the trunk, hard and thick, and the branches, reaching out for light are all staid, severe and secure. They endure by finding their place and staying there.

Sometimes the high country is pelted with bolts of electricity and junipers, like so many lightning rods, attract the searing brands with troubled equipoise. They carry the record of forgotten storms as cortical scars etched into their boles. Sometimes these wounds fester and trees die. At other times trees survive the strikes only to succumb to fire. Juniper bark, after all, is ideal tinder. As it ages, it peels free in places from the trunk and dries, leaving woody threads that are easily enflamed.

But if a tree is burned to death, the rich soil built from years of decaying scaly leaves will nourish new seedlings. But this takes time. Junipers do not thrive where there are frequent fires. Fortunately large fires are not as common at higher elevations as they are at lower ones. The air is thinner - with less oxygen - and fuel is not piled so high. There are places at lower elevations where junipers are expanding their range but these are usually places that have been managed free of fires.

In its high southern home, the Sierra juniper survives in spite of storms, fires and punishing air. Or maybe it is more appropriate to say that it survives because of them. At 9,000 feet it’s hard to know exactly what adversity really means. The wind that scours is a thrill to breathe and the wisdom surrounding these twisted trees can tempt the grateful visitor to never leave.

References:

The John Muir quote comes from his essay A Wind-Storm in the Forests. A bit on juniper spices can be found in Jill Norman’s, The Complete Book of Spices.

Organic Farming and the Sanity of Common Sense

2011-11-11T12:58:00.001-08:00

At the very beginning of her monumental book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson acknowledged the many people who were trying to stop the irresponsible poisoning of the world. She then wrote that it would require many small battles to ultimately bring "sanity and common sense" to the world.

That was written back in 1962 when much of the agricultural community was intent on using a handful of very effective (and very toxic) molecules to bring the myriad insect pests, weeds and pathogens under control. This was a great period of change in America and the rest of the developed world. Previous generations had always assumed that the natural world (which they loved and which they relied upon for their lives) was a challenge to be overcome with hard work and intelligence. These new chemicals were just the newest advances in the on-going quest to bring nature to order. And, as it turned out, they worked very well.

We now know that these early successes came with a price and Rachel Carson's book was a large reason why things are so different now. In the half century that now separates us from Silent Spring we have a much larger variety of pesticides. These products are many times safer (both to people and to other living things) than the chemicals we were using 50 years ago. Our agricultural colleges now teach a wide variety of agricultural techniques that were unheard of back then. And the banner of Organic Farming is now being waved all across the country. Pesticide-free produce is becoming a big business and consumers now demand that growers measure pesticide residues in parts-per-billion, whereas their parents could hardly measure chemicals a thousand times more concentrated. We are much safer and much more concerned about anything on our food these days than our parents ever were.

And yet things continue to change. The rising generation is no longer as worried about pesticides as it is about global warming, water conservation and soil loss. This doesn't mean that nobody is worrying about weed killers. A lot of us do. But frankly, regulatory agencies and chemical manufacturers have been dealing with these issues so long now that an overall consensus has been reached. The rules are clear: you can't sell nasty chemicals anymore. Of course there are still people who ignore the labeled instructions that come with agricultural chemicals and sometimes accidents do happen. But people also drive cars even though they continue to kill so many of us. We have just come to a better understanding of the risks and the alternatives involved.

And so you'll have to forgive me for being so bold as to say that Organic Farming is failing to address the full needs of our new reality. This is a little sad for me to say. I started my career over 20 years ago developing a botanical insecticide derived from the neem tree of Asia. My job was to measure the activity of this natural product against a wide array of pests. My co-workers and I were convinced that the world would soon recognize how important this was and that we would soon replace most of the nasty synthetic chemicals then in use.

Well that isn't exactly what happened. We did sell some of our product, but in the end, the company was bought by another environmentally conscious company, which then filed for bankruptcy only a couple of years later. And this is the story of most Ag biotech startup companies. They somehow get some funding, tell a great story about the rising business of organic agriculture, and then proceed to flounder. Only a handful of well-managed exceptions are still in business.

Which brings me back to Rachel Carson's plea for common sense. We have much bigger issues to deal with than pesticide abuse right now. Our parents were right - as was Silent Spring - that there existed a toxicological crisis in the world that needed immediate attention. But it's time today to take a look back, another look forward and yet another look around us. Songbirds are singing again in rural America.

Now I am not suggesting that we eliminate our watchdog groups. They are important. I am saying that the volumes of dire toxicological angst that the environmental movement continues to bless us with should target a more worthy opponent. We need to take better care of the land. This is our new crisis. And until we consensually recognize this problem, there is no guarantee that it will ever get resolved.

An example of what I mean by misplaced advocacy is the state of organic farming in California right now. There are well over 1,000 growers managing nearly 200,000 acres of organic farmland in the state. On average organic farmers are working a bit over 100 acres of land each. This may not sound like much in today’s world of mega-farms but the size is important. Managing 100 acres effectively requires that an organic farmer use fully modern equipment. And in order to justify the use of this expensive equipment, large markets in far-off places have to be found. What this means is that organic farmers are using just as much fuel both in production and shipping activities as their traditional neighbors - all in the effort to tap into a niche market or to satisfy an antiquated ideology.

These old-school soldiers should be commended for their hard work. But we no longer need all of their services. What we need now are a few more farmers determined to build up organic soils and use less water. Some of us are, in fact, doing just this. But we need a much larger cultural recognition of these efforts. We need consumers to pay for this larger conservation. We need a larger motivation for farmers to participate in saving the land. We also need more of us to start putting our small plots of land into production and start caring for the little spaces we do have responsibility for. We can either do so now voluntarily or at some future time when soaring food prices leave us no other choice.

It's time for a new generation to take the organic movement in a different direction. If Rachel Carson's generation was threatened with poisons, our children are more likely to be threatened with hunger and malnutrition. We need to take better care of the places that feed us and the places we live. Much depend on it.

Arise From the Dust and Be Men

2011-10-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

People hardly know what a man is anymore. I don’t mean that we don’t know the difference between men and women generally (although sadly this isn’t always true). I do mean that the traditional man, as seen as a role model for youth, is becoming an endangered species. Not only are we incapable of defining what he is, it’s not even politically correct to talk about it.

There are exceptions, of course. And one of the better ones of late is a book by Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield entitled Manliness. Mansfield argues that the most noticeable trait of manliness is assertiveness. Men are not only opinionated (so are women) but they are often assertive in their opinions. In some cases they’re even willing to come to blows over these opinions - which tendency they almost certainly didn’t get from their mothers.

And this is a big part of the problem. Those who insist on pushing for a gender-neutral society can’t tolerate this assertion. It can’t be trusted, they claim, and very often it leads to violence. We would be much better off getting rid of it altogether, or so they say.

And who can blame them? Any major city in the world (with few exceptions) is swarming with gangbangers and violent young men. Steven Pinker may be right that violence is declining in the world historically, but today it isn’t safe to be outside after dark in many places of the world. And the reason is because of big violent boys.

But let’s stop for a minute to consider what this means. If assertion is a defining characteristic of manliness, then there’s a pretty strong argument that it is part of human nature - at least that part of human nature carrying Y chromosomes. And attempting to change human nature is not a very good idea. Not only does it not work, it also causes a great deal of trouble.

In traditional Western society, improperly assertive men (as well as other delinquents) were dealt with in a way that was both appropriate and often successful. Manly men were put in charge of keeping them under control or of putting them in jail. Men-controlling-men was even more effective when an acceptable code of conduct was understood - as it clearly was in the age of chivalry.

The main problem with trying to do away with manliness is that it only succeeds in creating more delinquent boys, and immature men. For despite what modern feminists claim about raising boys in man-free environments, fatherless boys aren’t more caring and responsible than their peers. They are, in fact, much more likely to land in prison.

I am reminded of the story related by James Dobson a number of years ago about a greeting card company that decided to give free Mother’s Day cards to any inmate in a local prison wishing to remember his mother. The line for the cards was long and the kind gesture was seen as a great success. Everyone wanted to send a card to his mother. Then it was decided that a similar opportunity should be made for Father’s Day. This time, however, the result was much different. Not a single inmate showed up for a free card.

The truth is that our prisons are filled primarily with men, and over 90% of these men either hate their fathers or have no idea who their father is. This glaring reality begs for a better understanding than the broad anti-masculine brush stroke that is currently so popular. Clearly, boys that don’t connect with men – failing to become responsible men themselves – very often cost society a great deal. The push for a gender-neutral society is missing the point and it is costing us a great deal.

And I think that we need to pay more attention to what Mansfield has to say. Nonetheless, I don’t think that assertiveness is enough of a defining trait by itself. It serves to delineate a certain boundary in an academic fashion but it isn’t up to the task of dealing with the higher and lower expressions of manhood. This is something required of a higher value system. It is something that is required of revealed religion.

One of the best references I know of defining manhood is in Second Nephi (Chapter 1:21, in The Book of Mormon): “ …arise from the dust, my sons, and be men and be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things, that ye may not come down into captivity…”.

First of all, I am impressed with Lehi’s use of the word dust. This is a word with a fairly consistent meaning in sacred literature. We don’t see references of cleaning dust off the kitchen cabinet, or even from moldering scrolls. Dust is normally used as a contrast to the divine. It is used to describe that part of the world that decays – not just dry particulates. The Psalmist, for example, in describing the creatures of the sea (even Leviathan) says they will “die, and return to the dust” (Psalms 104:29).

Dust also has a very strong tie to the Creation. It is dust into which God breathes the breath of life and creates man. And it is in the Creation story that the contrast between the very finite (dust) and the very eternal (breath of God) are juxtaposed.

So when Lehi tells his sons to “arise from the dust and be men” he very likely has these images in mind. He is telling his sons that manhood requires moving beyond the mundane and mortal parts of their nature. It is a repudiation of the fallen world and a call to follow their divine natures.

Now in our post-Darwin world this has a lot more meaning. The reality of a mortal (dust) aspect of Creation now implies an animal nature as well. Survival of the fittest (to use Herbert Spencer’s summary phrase of Darwin’s insight) is something that might easily include an alpha-male hierarchy. It is also a neat explanation for male promiscuity (females, it is argued, would tend to evolve more caution in reproductive matters) and deception.

In short, Darwinian logic subsumes just about every form of human selfishness imaginable. For us today, considering Lehi’s plea, there is thus a higher sense of what a divine manhood should include. To “arise from the dust and be men” means to overcome the fallen world. It means to rise above the natural inclinations of selfishness and to shoulder responsibility. It means stepping outside the boundaries of natural selection into a higher order of divine potential.

This is a far different understanding of manhood than the one being pushed upon us by postmodern society, which sees only a continuum between healthy rough and tumble play in the nursery to the predatory male behind bars.

Which brings me to the second part of Lehi’s plea: “be men … that ye may not come down into captivity”. I think that Lehi is here recognizing that true manhood – the kind that has arisen above mortal selfishness – is the kind required to fight for liberty. This distinction seems to recognize the differences between true liberty and mere license (that ersatz liberty of libertines). And it is a task required of men.

In contrast, God has never expected his daughters to fight for freedom on the battlefield, although many of them have through the centuries. The womanly nature of nurturing cannot be asked to engage in a potential violence of freedom. This is a requirement of men. It is in men’s nature to fight for a cause – whether that fight be physical or otherwise.

Lehi’s manhood is thus a call to all the noble qualities that men are capable of. If we were destined to live our lives entirely under the constraints of Darwinian selfishness, then none of these higher aspirations would make any sense. And society would have every right to control the male social dysfunction any way it could. But we are not merely mortals, and we desperately need a manhood that will confront this reality.

Who could live in such a fallen world anyway – a world that denies our dual nature? We are so much more than just physical beings – so much more than mere animals. Our fights are not all against “nature red in tooth and claw.” Some of them are within - between a divinely inspired male and his Darwinian nature. But this is a battle that men have been fighting and winning for a very long time. And it is a battle that is meant to continue.

In the end we have to decide which kind of world we want to have. Our current postmodern and post-Darwin social constructs are experiments that cannot endure. They are neither grounded in the fallen real world or in the higher eternal one. And they have done enough harm already.

Our only real option is to stop stirring up so much dirt and sand, and let our higher natures lead us out of this storm. In the meantime we can let this dust devil die and look to stand a little taller. We will need some of Lehi’s men to do it.
References

Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness was published by Yale University Press in 2006. See also James Dobson’s Bringing up Boys (Tyndale Press, 2001).

Ecology and Dominion

2011-10-15T07:10:00.000-07:00

Are Christians really responsible for our current neglect of the natural world? Many environmentalists think we are. Some even go so far as to blame Christians for the entirety of the environmental crisis. Controlling a river, mining a mountain, or felling a forest, they say, are just so many ways of “filling the measure of” – or exercising “dominion” over – the Creation, or so it is claimed.

Much of this thinking stems from a 1967 article written by medieval historian Lynn White entitled The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis. White's article was published in the premier American science journal Science and received a great deal of sustained attention. My teachers were still making me read it in graduate school in the 1980's. White's claim is that the many scientific and technological advances in Europe over many centuries owe more to the ideology of Christianity than they do to the more recognized events of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In particular, White claims that the Christian belief in an inanimate world enabled it to break free of disabling pagan fears of the supernatural and to "exploit nature for [God's] proper ends".

This has been fairly convincing in many quarters, especially to that academic species that claims to be so disinterestedly critical of Christianity. One of the problems with all this is that White pays little regard to Christian theology. In fact he uses the wrong word. Maybe he does so intentionally, then again, maybe not. The correct word is dominion not exploitation - two words I might add that are a long way from being synonyms.

The King James Bible tells us that on the Sixth Day of Creation “God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth…” Now at first glance, this “dominion” might seem to carry a sense of arbitrary power, or a call to coercion. But this is a biased view and one that, perhaps unavoidably, is constrained by linguistic history.

If someone is a lord or a master today, he might be able (given enough power) to destroy a hillside, a forest, or even a country. In ancient times, this was not the case. A master of a nomadic tribe might be able to control his extended family and perhaps a herd of cows but not much else. Having dominion over the earth couldn't mean much more than the burning of a few roods or the partial diversion of a local stream.

"Well," you might say, "the Bible was written for our time as well as for previous times and God must have known about the power we would have today." Maybe so, but consider where the word dominion actually comes from and what it used to mean. Its root is the Latin dominus meaning lord or master of a household. In fact the word dominus itself comes from the simpler domus which literally means house, or home.

Isn't it interesting (and not a little ironic) that this same regard for the hearth was the intent of early ecologists when they coined the word for their own science (using Greek instead of Latin). They joined the words oecos (meaning house or home) and the traditional logos (referring to words or study) into our English ecology, or the study of the household. Only in this case the "household" was understood to be the environment.

Without realizing it, both environmentalists and Christian traditionalists are fighting over the same household. Or at least they should be. Both the provenance and the importance of these diagnostic words are much more similar than we are recognizing them to be. If we could see this and stop fighting each other we might be able to start fixing some of our failing landscapes.

Christians might start by thinking more seriously about the Biblical meaning of dominion; which as we have seen, is much more about taking care of where we live than it is about arbitrary and extractive rule. This Biblical sense is one of stewardship and the Christian conception of the Creation is one of sustainability, much like the agrarian ideal of today's resurfacing nostalgia. It is also a practical sustainability.

Consider how it is used in the creation story. God has just intended to make mankind in His own image. Then (in the same verse) mankind is told to have dominion over the earth. It should seem obvious that reading a destructive form of dominion into this verse is forced. In fact such a reading implies that the Creator is Himself an exploiter of His own creation – like a French chef preparing dinner for the pigs. Clearly the Creation means more to Him than that. It was an act of beauty and of love.

And this brings me to another complaint I have with White’s essay. White (correctly) pointed out that the Latins (read early Christians) found salvation in doing things rather than just dreaming about them. This he contrasts with the Eastern theological preference for merely contemplating religion. But White should have known that the reality is much more nuanced than this.

For starters, Christianity was originally given to both orthodoxy (emphasizing correct doctrine) and orthopraxy (given to correct works). It did inherit from Judaism a strong sense of practical religious involvement in one's own salvation. And White is right that "Western theology has been voluntarist". But Christianity was also preoccupied with correct doctrine. Religions that do so (emphasizing doctrine) tend to evolve several splinter groups - call them heresies if you will. Anybody even faintly familiar with early Christianity can see that this was an oft-occurring reality.

And later, following the Reformation, Protestant groups strongly favored orthodoxy. They still do. And it is this branch of the Christian family, more so than the others, that is driving the capitalist exploitation of the environment. So for White to claim that our ecological woes are being foisted on us by the purveyors of Latin works-centered religion leaves one embarrassed by his history and perplexed by his logic.

What this means for environmentalists is that they should stop blaming Christians for our many environmental problems. Of course there are guilty Christians. There are also many guilty corporations but this doesn't make all Christians and all corporations unilaterally evil. Christian doctrine has always been environmentally responsible even if individual Christians have not been. And if you happen to be watching, there is a growing drive in the business community to make earth-friendly products. In fact some of our biggest retailers are requiring their suppliers to prove a level of ecological regard if they plan to continue doing business. It is very likely that the biggest contributors to a sustainable future will come from the corporate sector.

So let me end by giving a bit of advice to all you belligerent environmentalists who take such joy in brow-beating your Christian neighbors. Many of us are just as concerned as you are about the fate of our planet. After all, we are in this “home” together and it’s time to stop living like a dysfunctional family. Dominion, after all, is ecology – only with a bit more responsibility thrown in for good measure.

References

White's infamous article The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis was published in the March 1967 issue of Science (Volume 155: 203-207). For a discussion on orthodoxy and orthopraxy see Daniel Peterson's Abraham Divided.

The Compost Pile

2011-09-27T19:14:00.000-07:00

A hidden lap of earth
Behind the garden blind
Where fallen leaves and even
Kitchen scraps combine

What time transfigures with
A fungus, worm and spade
Into a hill of humic
Soil in earthy shade

And here a hideaway
That no one seems to see
Anticipating need

Of little miracles
That take from wasted things
And give them to a seed

A New Book Barn in Clovis

2011-09-17T19:20:00.000-07:00

There is a certain gravitas about a bookstore going out of business. Never mind the ones that are mismanaged. In Fresno we have other things to worry about. You see, a few years ago our humble town was ranked as the dumbest city in America. Several criteria were used to determine this ranking such as the number of college graduates, advanced degrees, graduate programs, etc. But one of the criteria was the number of bookstores and the number of books purchased.

So when Border’s (in Fresno) announced recently that it was going out of business, some of us took the news with a wince. I do admit that it was nice buying books at the going-out-of-business sale that lasted several weeks. I picked up John Farrell’s recent biography of Clarence Darrow for a song and a few other titles for even less. This week, however, the sale is over and the old store is dark and empty.

Of course we still have places to buy books. Barnes & Noble Booksellers across the street has always been a better bookstore anyway. It’s just that I keep thinking to myself that this will only confirm, at least in the minds of some, Fresno’s position at the bottom of the list – or shall we say at the top of the list – of the dumbest places to live.

So it was with a real sense of relief and pleasure that I discovered the opening of a new bookstore, not in Fresno this time but on the other side of town, in Clovis actually.

You may remember A Book Barn located on 5th Street. It was a small used bookstore with about 1,200 square feet of floor space and with between 22,000 and 25,000 volumes for sale. Well, the owners (Dan and Peggy Dunklee) have moved around the block to 640 Clovis Ave. They now have 8,000 square feet of floor space (on 2 floors) and have over 80,000 volumes for sale, with room for another 70,000.

Last week I drove to the old store (which I visit every few months) along 5th Street and couldn’t figure out why I was so disoriented. The “bookstore” sign was gone and so I had to park my truck and walk the storefronts looking for the old volumes in the window. Sadly there weren’t any. All I found was a poster-board sign and I feared that we were losing yet another bookstore. Thankfully I was wrong. There was nothing there about going out of business, only directions to the new place.

And when I walked into the new building I knew that something good had just happened to Clovis. Besides the space, there is much more lighting than in the old store and one can’t help but look up and about at all the books. And there is even a reading corner with comfortable furnishings on the second floor. There is now enough room for stacking shelves with the non-obvious volumes that make treasure seeking plausible – volumes that otherwise molder in backroom boxes and storage sheds.

I chatted with one young man who was busy stacking shelves and complimented him on the store. I didn’t have to convince him that he was doing a good thing. And I didn’t have to tell him that a good used bookstore is so much more fun than the purveyors of recently published vulgarities.

I don't mean to downplay the big book dealers. I buy their books – probably more than I should. But I never get as excited about one of their debuts as I am about our own new used bookstore. I know it isn’t easy to make a living in used books – no matter how big the business. And these are difficult economic times. But here is a new opportunity for Fresno. All it takes to thrive is for a few more of us to stop by and patronize this worthy cause on a regular basis. It means that we need to improve our reading habits.

But Dan and Peggy are making it easy. They have extended store hours (9-7, Monday -Saturday; 11-5, Sunday) and Dan told me that he plans on having community events like poetry readings and book clubs. With luck they may even help us claw our way out of the rankings we’ve fallen into. Or better yet, they may help you find the perfect book to read. I found several.

Cities are Vulnerable

2011-09-03T08:16:00.000-07:00

Sometime around three years ago an important shift occurred on planet Earth. It was an almost imperceptible shift. Even so, there is much to this shift that thoughtful people should consider. It affects a whole lot of us and it will certainly affect our children and grandchildren. Since 2008, there are now more people living in cities than live in rural areas. We are now an urban species with a rural past instead of a rural species with a few urban tendencies.

This month's Scientific American is dedicated to this new reality - to cities and all of their presumed virtues. And make no mistake, there are quite a few urban virtues. Some of the most notable ones include innovation and the wise use of resources. It might not come as a surprise that proximity helps generate ideas. but it comes as a surprise to some of us that proximity also means more energy efficiency. People living in big cities often use less energy than their rural relatives - or so it is claimed.

One of the urban virtues that stands out in my mind is the existence of world class museums and venues for the arts. Rural areas usually don't have enough resources to promote such cultural opportunities. I suppose that one can make the same argument for athletic teams. It is the big city that is able to pay for the big events.

Of course there is a flip-side to these arguments. Crime is perhaps the most obvious. But cities are also the primary place of declining traditional values. And one has to point out that the so-called energy efficiency of cities is only possible because rural people produce what cities consume. The carbon footprint is not just about urban cleanliness. It is more about a division of labor. And, in fact, the innovation card itself is becoming less and less convincing as advances in communication make it possible for rural and urban people alike to interface - obviating many difficulties of distance.

But there is another urban cost that is almost never mentioned in these discussions - and one barely even implied in this month's Scientific American. It is a cost that we seem willing to pay at the moment but a cost, nonetheless, that we may not be up to paying in the future. This cost is vulnerability. And cities are vulnerable in several different ways.

The most obvious recent example is the September 11 attacks in New York City and Washington DC. But this is clearly no isolated case. History is full of these kinds of focused attacks on populated areas. Troy fell because of a well-placed "gift horse". Pharaoh's metropolis was leveled by Biblical plagues. World War II finally ended after the ruin of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cities will always be the focus of terrorists and warmongers who seek to do the most harm with limited resources.

Mother Nature is another source of urban vulnerability. In Northeastern Colorado where I used to live, tornadoes were the main natural cause of concern. I remember one trip I made out to the small agricultural community of Akron (near the Kansas and Nebraska borders). There was a tornado in the area that particular day and many of the citizens were in their cars and trucks looking to get a good picture of it. I have no memory of any damage done. Perhaps there was. But the overall attitude was noticeably free of worry.

In contrast, the town of Windsor, Colorado where we lived experienced a tornado some years later (after we had moved away) that was experienced very differently. The tornado itself was not any bigger, as I recall, than the Akron tornado but it bounced around town and caused a great deal of damage. The house we had previously owned was hit directly and the garage was ruined. Two of the trees I planted years before were snapped in two. People were worried and afraid - and understandably so. A tornado in a city is a very dangerous thing.

Or consider the current situation of the Northwest Coast of the United States. Recent findings are showing a great deal more geological stress building up along the Cascadia Fault than was previously expected. This stress involves a stretch of coast running from northern California north past Vancouver in an area that used to be considered fairly stable. Now it is known to be a fault similar to the ones that caused the recent Sri Lanka and Japanese tsunamis. The worry (and it is a real one) is that this fault may rupture at any time. It is now known to have a periodicity of around 300 years with the last one having occurred about 300 years ago. It goes without saying that there are several cities along this coast that are vulnerable. Unfortunately, not all of them have made sufficient preparations.

Civil unrest is yet another vulnerability of cities. Drug deals and their associated gang violence are only a modern variation on a theme that is as old as Sodom and Gomorrah. In some instances all it takes is a traffic jam to start a riot. But consider the situation of impending weather. How many times have store shelves been emptied because of a looming blizzard. When these sorts of things happen for more than just a day or two, it invariably happens that stores are broken into and crime escalates.

Then there is the long history of inflation and hyperinflation where the purchasing power of money becomes difficult or even impossible. In such cases trade networks begin to be controlled by gangs and city life becomes a jungle. In the West we hardly think of this eventuality anymore because of the many fortunate decades we have enjoyed living with relative economic security. We should be wise enough to take a longer historical perspective.

How close we were a couple of years ago to a major shut-down may never be known. But consider the facts. Financial institutions were going bankrupt on a weekly (even on a daily) basis. Many businesses were unable to get credit. Grocery stores and transport companies were feeling the heat as gas prices began to skyrocket. A chain of events starting with limited food could have easily lead to mob rule. Fortunately this didn't happen. But I know that several people were buying (or otherwise dusting off) guns just in case.

This was not the case among self-sufficient folks living in rural areas, many of whom have their own storage room of canned goods and other necessities. Of course many of us living in urban and suburban areas are also prepared in this way to one degree or another. But this doesn't change my overall argument: cities are more vulnerable than rural areas.

Now I suspect that this isn't going to change much of anything, at least for most of us. Cities are going to continue to get bigger and most of us are going to have to live with the vulnerability. But let's not be so naive as to think that nothing could be better than living the busy city life of technology and innovation. There are reasons to get out of town that transcend the rat-race. And if this isn't possible for your particular situation, then hopefully you will at least get ready for coming troubles.

Whether you live in Seattle and need to move to higher ground or in Los Angeles and need to buy heavier doors, it might pay to postpone the purchase of your next electronic toy and stock your pantry with a few more cans of stew. Much might depend on such simple precautions.

References:

This month’s Scientific American is Volume 305 (number 3). For the imminent Northwest tsunami see Cascadia’s Fault by Jerry Thompson (published this year by Harper Collins).

Sophrosune

2011-08-27T15:38:00.000-07:00

There are some words that carry such a rich and nuanced meaning that it is virtually impossible to translate them adequately. When they are translated, meaning is inevitably lost. Some of the world’s great insights have been overlooked (and even lost) because of this unfortunate reality.

One such word is the Greek sophrosune. The dictionary indicates that it means: mental soundness, moderation, good sense and self-control. Its cognates also mean: sensible, sober, serious, discrete, prudent and chaste.

This is a lot for a word to mean. Try putting yourself in the situation of a translator who, upon finding sophrosune in a text, had to pick and choose among the many possible meanings. Such a task becomes exasperatingly futile when one realizes that the author did not have in mind just one of these definitions. When ancient authors used sophrosune they most certainly had in mind more than one. In some cases they may have intended all of them.

Take for example Paul’s use of the word in the Pastoral Epistles to Timothy and Titus. These letters were written towards the end of Paul’s life, after he had spent a good amount of time away from Judea. I expect that his time away included a more thorough understanding of both the Greek and Latin languages. Perhaps he had learned to appreciate the significance of the word sophrosune to a greater degree than he had before. It certainly shows up in his later writings more frequently than in his earlier work.

For example, in his letter to Titus (first chapter and eighth verse) Paul says that a bishop must be a “lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate”. This is the King James translation, which translates sophrona as “sober”. The New International Version translates the verse such that a bishop must be “hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined.” Here the translated word is “self-controlled.” The Revised Standard Version indicates that a bishop must be “hospitable, a lover of goodness, master of himself, upright, holy, and self-controlled.” Here it is translated as “master of himself.”

These translations do the best they can but there is obviously a real loss here. Of course a bishop should be a sober man, but this hardly describes everything Paul meant to say. In this loss of understanding, we have also lost sight of the kind of person that such a word implies. For sophrosune describes a person of great character. It describes a person that has control of his/her inner life.

This kind of self-mastery is at the heart of the Christian message. David O. McKay said that “An upright character is the result only of continued effort and right thinking, the effect of long-cherished associations with Godlike thoughts. He approaches nearest the Christ spirit who makes God the center of his thoughts; and he who can say in his heart, “Not my will, but thine be done” approaches most nearly the Christ ideal.”

For Saint Augustine there was a great difference between those with this inner control and those without it. “For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed… so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked.”

Sophrosune was understood as the antithesis of hubris – that sin of selfish and destructive pride that afflicted many of the ancient world; and sadly, perfectly describes all too many of our own. And I think it is significant that we have retained the word hubris, while forgetting sophrosune. It is human nature to bristle at the arrogant upstart that we recognize in hubris. But we seem to find it altogether inconvenient to gain the mastery of our inner selves that sophrosune requires of us.

And why should we? Nobody seems to care anyway. Not too many generations ago, our ancestors learned about Washington and Lincoln not only as American presidents but as men who had cultivated a noble character. Today they are only considered historical figures. Instead of reading their staid and inspiring words, we learn only of the role they played in the formative events of our country. The strength of their inner selves is never considered.

Our youth grow up wondering what great things they might achieve in their lives, focusing on careers, wealth, beauty and influence. Their heroes are persons that have achieved some level of outer visibility and excellence. We look almost in vain to find the hero that inspires us with inner excellence.

No other writer in modern times has focused more meaningfully on this problem than has Irving Babbitt. He did not use the word sophrosune (I’m not sure if he knew Greek) but it is the major theme of his life’s work. He found it to be a major theme of the Judeo-Christian heritage as well as other Eastern religions and philosophies. He also saw its eclipse starting with Rousseau and Romanticism and growing in our modern world into our love of democratic superficiality.

Recognizing the lack of character in our modern academics, he paraphrases Emerson and Goethe approvingly: “The intellect is fatal to earnestness, says Emerson; Goethe has said it still more wisely that everything that emancipates the intellect without giving us a corresponding self-mastery is pernicious.”

And in his essay on Matthew Arnold he criticizes the inability of our democracy to ennoble anybody. “A glance at a current display of our newspapers and popular magazines suggests that, though we are not fools, we are reading just the things that fools would read.”

Yet for all the insight of Babbitt’s diagnosis – and it often seems right on the mark – he refrains from describing in any detail how this inner check might be developed. He talks about it as though it were self-evident. But it isn’t. Self-mastery, after all, is not only unpopular it is hard to develop. It isn’t something that is rationally acquired or decided upon and then experienced the next day. There is an element of uncertainty involved and it takes time. It requires directing one’s life according to principles that are not always well defined. In a word, it requires faith.

Hugh B. Brown said that “Man cannot live without faith, because in life’s adventure the central problem is character-building – which is not a product of logic, but of faith in ideals and sacrificial devotion to them.”

This is a very important insight – this relationship between character and faith. In fact I cannot think of another time in the history of the world when it takes so much faith to develop self-mastery. There are virtually no societal rewards anymore to someone deciding to gain mastery over their lives. It is a quiet quest of anonymity.

But there has never been a time in the history of the world when it was more needed. David O. McKay once made the contrast between two inebriated men. The first man lived over a hundred years ago and the worst that came of his condition was that he might have run his horse or chariot off the road into a ditch. The second man today may end up rolling his car off of the highway. If he is lucky he will only end up in the hospital form a short period. If less lucky he might lose his life or the lives of others.

In important personal ways there really isn’t much difference between these two men other than the technologies they use and the times in which they live. And yet the differences are very real indeed.

Or consider the inclination to view pornography. A century ago someone with a strong inclination might live his life and never suffer because of this weakness. Because a century ago there weren’t many opportunities to indulge in the practice. Today, though, things are very different. A man with only a slight inclination can end up hurting himself and his family a great deal. He may even be the cause of breaking up his home, or worse. And all of this because of the technology that makes it so easy to get caught up in it all.

Our times are not times to be morally indifferent. We really can’t afford to be. Yet sadly these very same times see so many of us so little interested in being masters of our inner selves. It used to be that a business owner in a small town might establish his character and benefit from it financially. A researcher might insist on high standards and be recognized for it. An athlete might be more concerned about sportsmanship than about winning a game. But these virtues are becoming rarer all the time. And sophrosune has little chance of making a comeback in such a cultural mess. Our democracy has given us all the chance to excel but instead of taking advantage of this opportunity most of us have merely become numbed into apathy. Character to us is something possessed by a novel or an abrasive personality – a character. Moral strength has nothing to do with it.

The small chance that true character has left is if visionary men and women, with enough faith in higher standards, will live a life of unrecognized nobility in order to become a person that few will ever understand. It will require them to rise above our culture and live with an eternal perspective because in our world, sophrosune requires faith.

References

For the David O. McKay quote see Teachings of the Presidents of the Church, David O. McKay, pg. 218. His example of the two drunk men are on page 160 of his recent biography (by G. Prince and R. Wright) David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. Augustine’s quote is from The City of God, Book I, Chapter 8. Two of Babbitt’s most important books on the inner check are Democracy and Leadership and Character and Culture. The reference to Goethe is in his essay Are the English Critical in Character and Culture. Hugh B. Brown’s statement is from a talk given by Richard G. Scott in the October, 2010 General Conference, The Transforming Power of Faith and Character.

An Everlasting Dominion

2011-08-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

Five days ago I sat in the Salt Lake Temple (in downtown Salt Lake City) and watched, in the official capacity of a witness, as my son was married to a remarkable young lady. The ceremony was simple but the profound promises and the sense of eternal significance perfused the whole event. Mothers, fathers, and many others wept. Even brothers sniffled. The bride and groom were overcome by it all. And as I sat just a few feet from the altar trying to control my own emotions, I began to sense an importance of the event that I could not readily place my finger on.

I was (and continue to be) very well aware of the binding nature of temple covenants. But this was the first time in my life that I began to catch a glimpse, at a deeper personal level, of something more. Over the next few days I came to appreciate that I was sensing the expansion of my dominion.

This may sound a bit egotistical. Dominion, after all, is a word that we normally associate with power and wealth. I was not experiencing these things in the least. (Quite the contrary, in fact, as I was in one sense losing an immediate member of the household, and it was costing me quite a bit of money!) But then the inspiring passages in the 121st Section of the Doctrine and Covenants came into my mind:

“Let thy bowels also be full of charity towards all men, and to the household of faith, and let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from heaven. The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion, and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth; and thy dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever.” (The italics are mine.)

Now the first definition of the Oxford English Dictionary under dominion refers to a piece of land, a domain. A king’s dominion included the territory he ruled. It also meant the things that occupied that land, often including the possessions of people and even individual persons themselves.

But at its root, dominion refers to something that seems much simpler and more humble. It refers to a household, the Latin domus. And it is this meaning that worked its way into my understanding and clarified my joy. My household was growing, and I had (and still have) all the confidence in the world that the two lovely young people in front of me would be instruments in that expansion. They were part of my eternal dominion and I couldn’t help but love them for that.

Now what stands out so obviously to me about this scriptural dominion is its basis in individual agency. There is no element here of tyrannical rule or of an enforced sovereignty. This is a dominion that comes without “compulsory means”.

Now I am no legal scholar but as I understand real estate agreements, our land is owned and ultimately protected by compulsion, or at least the threat of compulsion. If I trespass on someone’s land, or fail to make payments on my own, I can be compelled to make recompense or face punishment.

On the other hand, everlasting dominion (in its scriptural sense) is not based on this use of force. It comes on its own. Or maybe it would be better to say that it comes as a natural (even inevitable) part of living virtuously and charitably.

This was all a surprise to me. I have often been saddened by my lack of an immediate inheritance of land. My brother and sisters all live in the same town I grew up in. I am the only member of the family that has moved around a great deal. And I have often longed for a place – transcending generations – of fruitful land that would partly define me and my descendants. This is the kind of dominion I have often thought about. I still do, in fact.

But I learned something new last Tuesday that I wasn’t expecting, when I entered the temple. You see I have attended other wedding ceremonies – wonderful ceremonies. They reminded me of my own marriage and of the wonderful woman that is my own eternal companion. But this was the first time I really sensed the bigger picture. I became more than just a husband and father. Or maybe I should say that I sensed more truly what it means to be an eternal husband and father. It isn’t something that I can easily put into words.

After all the promise accompanying this dominion is that it comes with the companionship of the Holy Ghost. It truly is something that must be experienced in order to appreciate. It is part of gaining an eternal perspective.

Maybe at some time in the future these two kinds of dominion will dovetail into a fuller eternal dominion full of family, faith and landscape. In the meantime I think I’ll just enjoy this part of getting older, and watch my family grow.

Royalty (for Kathy)

2011-07-27T14:52:00.000-07:00

Two lessons in a lilac bush
One just for sunny days
The other for an afternoon
Left dripping from the rain

A gentle blush upon your cheek
Is honey to the bee
But there is more than nectar in
The other part I see

Although it seems unusual
That lavender in sun
Can change the color of its robe
And wear a purple one

Believing Thomas

2011-07-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

Consider a young man in school who has spent long hours preparing for a final exam. It is an important exam. If he does well he can expect to receive a hefty scholarship. If he does poorly he may not get the educational experience he really wants. On the evening following the test he has a sudden misgiving about the last big essay question and fears that he misread it. Several days pass - each one filled with anxiety. When he finally gets the score he is greatly relieved. His teacher gave him high marks.

Now consider a woman who has just met an attractive man and wants to get to know him better. He appears to be a responsible and capable person but as she gets to know him she begins to have doubts. Some of the things he does aren’t consistent with the things he says. Eventually she learns that he is often dishonest and not morally trustworthy.

Both of these examples deal with doubt. In the case of the student, the doubt was misplaced. In the case of the dating woman it was not. Now let me give another example that is meant to contrast to these two.

Suppose a young man, raised in a caring home, comes of age and begins spending time with a crowd of delinquent youth. They poison his thinking about the way he was raised. After a time he begins fighting with his parents over simple family rules. He says he doesn’t believe them anymore. After several weeks of this he moves away from home and eventually ends up in jail.

In this story we notice the rebellion of the young man first and only secondly do we see his doubt. In fact doubt may not even be an issue, it’s hard to say for sure. Yet as vague as this may seem it is more the scriptural sense of doubt than the first two examples.

This kind of doubt, as a disbelief and a turning away from truth, is the kind of doubt that has serious spiritual consequences. The doubts of the young student and the dating woman are different. They are part of a healthy human approach to the world. They represent a kind of doubt that makes us credible instead of credulous. Yet sadly we often fail to appreciate these different kinds of doubt. Even worse, we sometimes confuse a virtue for a weakness. When we do this we limit our own personal growth and understanding.

The story of Thomas the disciple of Christ is the saddest example of this that I know. His universally recognized nickname “Doubting Thomas” is one of history’s least merited attributions. It is true that he was uncertain about the risen Lord (see Luke 24) but there was never any rebellion involved and he never turned away from the truth. In fact, what we know of Thomas is the opposite of this.

At a time when Jesus’ popularity had grown to a degree that He was in mortal danger from the rulers of Jerusalem, Thomas was willing to give his life for the Master. Jesus had learned of Lazarus’s recent death and told His disciples that He would need to return to Judea, were recently he had nearly been stoned to death. Thomas, upon learning of Jesus’ dangerous trip said to the other disciples, “Let us also go that we may die with him” (John 11).

I don’t mean to imply that Thomas didn’t have doubts (meaning that he was uncertain) about the miracle of Christ’s resurrection. He did. What I want to show is that the kind of doubt he experienced is not necessarily an evil thing. It can be overcome with faithful effort. Many great men and women of faith experience much more doubt than did Thomas and yet we never think to accuse them of lacking faith.

Peter, for example, after walking briefly on the sea became troubled upon seeing the wind and the waves and sank. Jesus asked him why he doubted. Yet we don’t hold this against Peter. In fact we are amazed at the faith he must have had to walk the few steps he did take. Is Thomas’s doubt so much greater than Peter’s? I doubt it.

In a world of so many competing doctrines and philosophies - some that are clearly wrong and even harmful - we do well to be guarded about many of the claims of others. It serves us well to doubt - that is to acknowledge our uncertainty. And yet the command of Christ is to “doubt not.”

Perhaps there seems to be a contradiction. We are endowed with the tendency to doubt and then commanded not to. This is the same sort of thing we face with selfishness. It clearly helps us to survive, and yet spiritual growth requires that we overcome it (at least some of it). Some aspects of selfishness, like pulling your hand away from a hot stove or coming inside from a storm, are never considered spiritually bad. The selfishness that harms another or tarnishes our spirits, is.

Similarly, doubts about used cars will serve us well throughout our lives. Doubts about saving truths can harm us a great deal. Yet given these obvious differences, religious doubt has been seen to be a universal evil in ways that it shouldn’t have.

According to traditional Christian doctrine, religious truths are to be accepted on authority. Very often this leaves little room for anything between acceptance of a truth and its outright rejection. Similarly Latter-day Saints have often been taught that religious doubt is generally an evil thing (even of the devil). And while this is expected to refer to the doubt that rejects saving truths, other distinctions are often overlooked.

In contrast to this dubious absolutism, the prophet Alma (in Chapter 32 of the Book of Alma in The Book of Mormon) taught about experimenting on the words of life, growing from truth to truth. Then as we grow in our understanding and experience with truth we are lead to other truths and in the process come face to face with other unknown propositions. We then are faced with the option, yet again, of either faith or doubt. It seems that while struggling here in mortality we will ever be experimenting this way, and growing.

And yet it is possible to remove doubt, at least in part, if we find Someone who is completely trustworthy. And as we gain experience with this Someone, our doubt - even of things that seem miraculous - will disappear. Clearly this is a lifelong process even for the spiritually great souls among us - great souls such as Thomas.

Perhaps I am being a little bold in giving Thomas so much credit. But let me point out one of the greatest scriptural chapters we have about doubt, in the 9th chapter of Mormon (in The Book of Mormon). Here Moroni pleads with his readers repeatedly to believe in Christ, doubting nothing. Such an immense belief really makes no sense if all we understood by belief is a simple mental agreement. Such a belief is little more than gullibility.

The immense belief described by Moroni is the kind of belief our ancestors meant by the word be-love. Only a few centuries ago these two words (be-lief and be-love) were used interchangeably. Our misunderstanding of this earlier scriptural sense has led many to think that all we need to do in order to gain salvation is to acknowledge the reality of Christ, regardless of the behavior of our lives. This is a mistake. The scriptural significance of be-lief implies a life-directing commitment to the One that we love above all else.

A belief in Christ that comes from the center of our being, from experience with the divine, is a kind of belief that truly does eliminate doubt. And when we grow towards this kind of belief - this kind of experience with truth - to the point that we love its author enough, we approach the point where doubt no longer exists, and our faith in Him is complete.

I believe that Thomas was well along this path. We know he loved Jesus and was willing to experiment further with His truth - even traveling to the ends of the earth to teach it. I expect that his doubt was much less than ours is. We need to judge him less severely. Thomas was a believer.

References

The Catholic Encyclopedia under doubt gives a detailed evaluation of the word’s meaning from a religious and historical perspective. The Mormon reference to doubt in Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine, though not official church doctrine (despite the title), is somewhat ambiguous in its reference to doubt being of the devil. For an important discussion of be-lief and be-love see Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s Faith and Belief.

Revelation and the Sense of Awe

2011-06-29T15:38:00.000-07:00

Revelation is a basic principle of many religions. It is generally understood to be some kind of communication between God and man. In some traditions a sacred book is the primary form of this communication. In others it might be a mystical experience or a dream. Still others rely on holy men and women to interpret the portents of nature. In short, there are numerous ways that we understand revelation.

That said, one aspect of revelation that often gets overlooked is the experience of awe. This may sound like a strange juxtaposition – revelation and awe – but in some traditions they are pretty much the same thing. Or maybe more accurately: awe is the expected form (or an expected experience) of divine communication.

For many of us, in contrast, revelation comes with a rational handle that we can mull over and try to understand logically. Perhaps the original divine communication was a mystical experience - like Moses on Mount Sinai or Abraham before the altar - but the transmission of these experiences has become codified in a way that may require no sense of the divine presence at all.

Sadly this is becoming less and less apparent. In a time when the word revelation is being used more and more commonly, the experience of awe is getting overlooked and even forgotten. When this happens we run the risk of misunderstanding a very significant part of revelation: the actuality of being in the presence of the Divine.

I don’t mean to downplay the informational content of revelation. After all one can make the argument that it is the informational content that justifies the revelation in the first place. The Ten Commandments, for example, have held significance across millennia and in the lives of billions of people. Certainly this has been more important than the awe-inspiring moments on Sinai, experienced by one man, when the words were first received.

But let me ask a more difficult question. How valuable would those ten commandments be if nobody took the existence or the power of God seriously? Remember that Moses’s experience of God’s presence was not a trivial thing - not just an inspired thought or a clarifying insight. After removing his shoes and seeing in vision the immensity of God’s Creation he was left with the stunning realization that “man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed” (Moses 1:10).

One might argue that this experience of revelatory awe is of little significance today. Such experiences were for prophets who lived and wrote in the past. Maybe we can occasionally wonder at the marvels of creation - perhaps being in awe of pounding surf or the strength of a summer storm. But this is not the same. Our world is different we say.

This is where I disagree. If we have lost this wonder - this Biblical “fear of the Lord” - it can only be because we have failed to approach Him in a credible way or with an understanding of His handiwork.

The most obvious example of this myopia is our modern view of the Creation, and our disregard for the myths of other more “primitive” cultures. Anthropologists have accumulated a vast literature - now over a century old and building - of these stories relating how divine beings exist in or somehow manipulate the forces of nature for their own ends. Sometimes humans themselves persuaded divine beings to affect natural changes on their behalf. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough is full of these kinds of examples.

One taken almost at random is of the Waganda of Central Africa that believed in a lake deity that would take up his abode in a man or a woman and change the weather. In other cultures the sun is revered as a deity and at times fires are highly regarded as charms from the sun. The Yakut, Omaha and other peoples believed that they could influence the spirits that cause the wind to blow. In the Hebrides (on the altar of Fladda’s Chapel, on the island of Fladdahuan) a moist black stone was used to summon favorable winds. And of course there are numerous examples of rain dances from culture around the world, as well as examples of ways to make the sun shine. Year-end rites are similarly ubiquitous as formal ways to start the cycles of life anew.

One of the most awe-inspiring rituals that I know of from earlier times was the Incan transport of purified victims (if I may use that term) to the top of mountains for sacrifice. These rituals were solemn events conducted amid the perennial snow and lightning storms of the highest peaks in the Americas.

Yet we tend to smile knowingly and roll our eyes at such stories, glad to be so much more enlightened than people who believe (or have believed) them. It would probably surprise many of us if we knew just how recently our own ancestors believed such things. It was only yesterday, for example, that crop-destroying weather was seen as a punishment from God. And the rainbow, so easily understood today in Newtonian terms, was for thousands of years a sign of God’s promises. When we insist on seeing the world only through the single-lens optics of science, we miss most of the beauty in the world and a great deal of awe-inspiring revelation.

It seems strange to us today that so many Victorians were fascinated with natural history. On weekends - especially on the Sabbath - the English countryside was filled with formally-clothed ladies and gentlemen out looking for natural objects of interest. Some collected shells or other marine remnants that had been washed ashore. Others gathered ferns or pressed flowers. Many people put up easels and painted landscapes or birds. Still others became experts in aquariums or terrariums - collecting fish, beetles, or other creatures that captured their imaginations. Interest in the natural order was many times greater than it is today.

The reason for this interest is a little surprising to us today at a time when natural history is primarily taught on televised programs and in museums, and capture only a fraction of its former audience. During the Heyday of Natural History Victorians believed they could better understand the Creator if they went outside and studied the Creation. Millions of them did so. This was a time when a clergyman could be a recognized authority on nature just as easily (and more likely) than anybody else. There are historians that find it odd that Darwin (the epitome of Victorian science) could have contemplated wearing the “cloth” as a youth. But such were the times, and Darwin’s interest was typical, not unusual, for his time.

That this natural history was meant to inspire awe is readily seen in much of the period’s poetry and painting. For example, William Wordsworth (a Romantic and a Victorian) in On Her First Ascent of Helvellyn wrote of the third highest peak in the UK:

Inmate of a mountain dwelling
Thou hast clomb aloft, and gazed
From the watch-towers of Helvellyn
Awed, delighted, and amazed ….

In America, The Hudson River School of landscape painting was also inspired by Romantic artists though prominent during the late 19th Century. Most of these works are depictions of majestic nature scenes. My favorites were painted by Albert Bierstadt, especially his Sunrise, Yosemite Valley and Sunset in the Yosemite Valley.

But times change. The fascination with nature began to wane, and it is tempting to see this as just part of history’s ineluctable march. Europe was changing as was America and people had to adapt. But in at least one way this change was different. It came with a diminishing of the sense of divine awe. It’s true that the Heyday of Natural History occurred in a particular place at a particular time and can be roughly discerned as an historic period. But the habit of finding God in the manifestations of nature was always a part of human nature. It is only recently that we have wrung the divine out of the natural world. Is it any wonder that we are suffering so many ecological maladies as a consequence?

And yet if the toll has been great ecologically, what has been the spiritual cost? Are we expected to find spiritual satisfaction alone in texts? Is it right that we leave all discussion of nature to vivisectionists?

Medieval Catholics built immense cathedrals to lift the eyes and the minds of worshippers to God to inspire awe. Today most Catholics have little access to these historic remnants. Modern places of worship are often little more than meeting houses. In Europe most of these impressive churches have been converted to museums with fancy alarm systems and barred windows. Burglars are effectively kept out. Unfortunately so is Christ.

Latter-day Saints, by contrast, have never attempted to create buildings as magnificent as Notre Dame in Paris or the Dom in Cologne. Early buildings were often tasteful testaments of faith but the Mormon architectural preference (even in most temples) is for functionality. I know that there will be those who disagree with this, feeling that temples are beautiful structures (and I agree that they are). But Mormon buildings are really not created to inspire awe.

And in fact buildings were not the first place early Christians went to be elevated spiritually. Christ Himself went often to the wilderness – even into the mountains.

Latter-day Saint scriptures give other examples of finding God in nature. To the unbelieving Korihor, the prophet Alma (in The Book of Mormon) testified that the earth and all living things, as well as the planets and the laws that govern their regular form “do witness that there is a supreme creator” (see Alma 30:44).

Enoch (as recorded in The Pearl of Great Price) upon seeing a vision of God and His tears falling as rain upon the mountains was filled with wonder that such a being could weep. And as he looked upon the wickedness of man he “wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook” (see Moses 7:28-41).

Again in The Book of Mormon (as recorded in the 9th chapter of 3 Nephi) following the many devastating events at the time of Christ’s crucifixion, the voice of the Lord was heard declaring that He had been the cause of the many natural disasters that had recently occurred. He had caused great fires. He had caused cities to be swallowed up by the sea. The cities of Gadiandi, Gadiomnah, Jacob and Gimgimno He “caused to be sunk, and made hills and valleys in the place thereof.”

This is a part of our Christian faith that gets conveniently forgotten – primarily because it doesn’t easily fit into our modern understanding of the natural world. It needs to be considered more seriously. When we lose sight of the majesty of the Creator in His Creation we are left with the second-hand interpretations of fallible men to guide us. And this is hardly a recipe for spiritual understanding.

That awe was a very real and important part of the faith of our ancestors is certain. Perhaps they were more simple-minded than we are. So be it. This hardly serves as a justification for letting reason rob us of our need to find God, as if only the simple might have faith.

In fact many of our wisest thinkers have never lost their sense of wonder in spite of their grounding in science. Galileo, Newton, Einstein were filled with wonder. A more recent example is Loren Eiseley who was willing to grapple with the mysterious universe even while holding prestigious professorships in Anthropology and the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

His description of the surgical precision of a wasp that provisions its nest with cicadas is compelling. The insect prey is carefully paralyzed and buried in such a way that seems to transcend the possibility of its development by means of natural selection. Yet Eiseley concedes:

“I am an evolutionist”. but there seems to be “Nothing to explain the necessity of life, nothing to explain the hunger of the elements to become life, nothing to explain why the stolid realm of rock and roil and mineral should diversify itself into beauty, terror, and uncertainty.”

Why are we so hesitant to acknowledge the divine majesty of the unknown? Why is the word awful (literally, being filled with awe) used so negatively most of the time when it can mean great as well as terrible? Why have we forgotten that the powerful sense of awe can be a revelatory experience?

I don’t profess to have all the answers. But I do believe that a big part of the blame lies with our inability to negotiate the world of sophisticated technical knowledge with the divine reality of our true nature.

Irving Babbitt noticed this many years ago when he pointed out the natural tendency of wonder to lead to awe, if the beholder only seeks for a broad and meaningful understanding. “As a man grows religious, awe comes more and more to take the place in him of wonder.”

Babbitt then proceeds to show, however, that wonder does not always lead to a religious awe. In fact the beginning of the modern world contains many examples of the harm that can come from an apotheosis of wonder by itself, without God. For as Samuel Johnson pointed out wonder is merely the effect of novelty upon ignorance. And in a time such as ours with so many discoveries claiming our attention, one can’t help but be confronted with wonder - even on a regular basis.

But there is a big difference between this quotidian wonder and a profound encounter with the Divine. If our searching in the world of nature only surprises us with novelty even as it cures us of our physical ailments we will only manage to prolong our lives even as the spiritual vacuum that fills our lives remains intact.

The world and the cosmos are so much more than just interesting things - in spite of our many clever discoveries. They are not just items to wonder about. They are majestic, unfathomable and awful. They are also the workmanship, and home, of God. And they should help us get to know Him better.

References:

My copy of The Golden Bough is a 1981 reprint from Avenal Books, New York. See Johan Reinhardt’s The Ice Maiden (National Geographic) for an adventurer’s account of the Inca mummies. The Hudson River School, American Landscape Artists by Bert Yaeger (Smithmark) has the Bierstadt paintings I mention. On Latter-day Saint architectural history see People of Paradox by Terry Givens (Oxford University Press). For Babbitt’s discussion on wonder and awe, see Chapter II in Rousseau & Romanticism (Transaction Publishers). My Eiseley quote is taken from Chapter 23, The Coming of the Giant Wasps, in All the Strange Hours, the Excavation of a Life (Scribners).

Onion Thrips Don't Like Mulch

2011-06-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

Onion thrips don't like mulch. I know this because of a little experiment I conducted just recently. You see I live in an area of California were onions are regularly stripped of their chlorophyl by this little creature (that is smaller than an aphid and quite thin) and a lot of money is spent every year trying to keep it under control. So late last year as I was considering this sad state of affairs, I thought of a solution that might just be helpful to small farmers.

The whole idea centers around the fact that part of the thrips' life cycle is exposed and might be vulnerable to predators. In both the nymph and adult stages, thrips are fairly well protected deep within the closely spaced onion leaves where it is difficult for any kind or predator to go. Occasionally a small pirate bug manages to find a thrips (yes the singular of thrips is also thrips in case you were wondering) but for the most part, the thrips are able to freely feed on the onions without being molested.

One stage, however, is not so hidden. It is the pupal stage. When the nymphs have eaten and grown about all they can, they leave the protection of the leaves and drop to the soil where they change into an adult. In most agricultural situations, the thrips can find a small crack in the ground to hide without being bothered. If, however, an environment could be created (say a mulch covering of sorts) to bring in more predators, the thrips population might be reduced. The predators could eat the pupae and break the thrips life cycle.

With that thought in mind, I found a nice section of young onions last fall and built a bit of compost around a few dozen plants. It consisted of only a long board with a bit of grass clippings beneath - not much - but it was what I had available. I anchored these boards around the onions using thin wood stakes and left the plants pretty much alone. I kept the mulched onions and a couple of rows of adjacent (un-mulched) onions fairly free of weeds and adequately watered through the winter and spring. Then last week I decided to go out and see what the thrips populations were like.

What I found was what I had expected. The onions growing by the mulch had on average about 2 thrips per plant. The plants growing without a mulch had on average about 13 thrips per plant. As this was not a completely randomized and replicated trial I didn't run a statistical evaluation but I expect that the differences were real (the numbers were pretty tight). Somebody with more land and more time might want to do a more complete study but I think my hunch will bear itself out: thrips don't do as well when mulches are present because more predators exist to break their life cycle.

And in fact I took a look under my improvised mulch (the boards) and discovered several predators. There were small ground beetles and a couple of species of rove beetles. I don't know if they actually ate any of the thrips pupae (I didn't make any observations) but I suspect that some of them did.

Of course a conventional farmer, with acres of onions, will not have the wherewithal to mulch everything. They will need to continue using conventional methods to control the thrips. But there are better ways for the small farmer. Grass or stones might work well, as might other kinds of mulch. Try some out and let me know what you find. Your onions will be happy you did.

Intellectual Rhetoric and The Way of Ignorance

2011-05-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of years, I have watched a colleague of mine (I‘ll call her Lisa) first alienate herself from her peers and then received a sadly deserved demotion. She is a bright and friendly scientist holding both a Ph.D. (in the biological sciences) and an MBA. These credentials have served her well in many ways - helping her move up the corporate ladder - but ultimately they have not been able to save her from these recent embarrassments. One of her major stumbling blocks has been the failure to recognize the dangers of intellectual gamesmanship.

Lisa loves a good conversation and is witty. She grasps the meaning of arguments readily and loves to discuss hypothetical solutions to existing problems. She is able to quickly find her way to the limits of known solutions and then propose a course of action that makes intuitive sense. She is a valuable innovator because of this. Lisa is also competitive and, although this is often valuable, in certain circumstances it is a real handicap.

You see Lisa savors verbal victories - to have her solutions carry the day. Unfortunately her hypothetical solutions are sometimes wrong. In fact, in hindsight, it is easy to see that most of her solutions have been at least partially wrong. Over time these errors have accumulated and Lisa has lost credibility. She can still be convincing but she is no longer trusted or taken seriously. She has learned to excel at what I will call the art of intellectual rhetoric, but has failed to show sound judgment. Unfortunately this combination has cost her (and those who work with her) dearly.

Now I realize that scientific arguments are not normally categorized as rhetorical. Scientists, after all, are expected to follow where the data lead them, not to be convincing advocates of any particular cause. In a word, scientists are expected to follow dialectical methods, not rhetorical ones. The two approaches are quite distinct. And yet I choose the phrase intellectual rhetoric in spite of its apparent contradiction because I fear that it is no longer just an anomaly. More and more intelligent people are fitting its description.

In some ways the phrase may seem redundant. Thomas Sowell’s recent book Intellectuals and Society, for example, understands intellectuals to be primarily those talented social scientists that lack an adequate grounding for their proposed reforms. Unlike the data generated by the hard sciences that can be empirically tested, many social scientists propose striking social changes based on studies that cannot be confirmed in the real world. Advocates that fall in to Sowell’s categories certainly fit the description of intellectual rhetoricians.

There are others like Lisa, however, that are not social scientists per se but who are beginning to trouble our society using the same methods. Everywhere we turn there are new “experts” advocating changes that sound appropriate, using assumptions that are expected to be universally true. Biologists, for example, are now telling us that human evolution has fooled us in to believing that families are necessary, that giving to others is an ennobling thing, that God is real. These arguments become quite convenient in the hands of passionate and persuasive intellects seeking change - and all in the name of an unbiased scientific inevitability. We would be wise to use caution when confronted with these convincing “experts“. Many, if not most, of their arguments contain flaws. We may not know what they are right now, but they exist nonetheless. And like Lisa’s many mistakes, they will end up costing us dearly.

Ironically the most reasonable path to pursue given such uncertainty is to follow what Wendell Berry has called The Way of Ignorance. Berry’s title can be a little misleading. He is not suggesting that we intentionally make uninformed decisions. On the contrary, we should inform ourselves as best we can, especially if our decisions are momentous ones. What Berry means by The Way of Ignorance is that we need to act with the awareness that even our best knowledge is probably not perfect - that even with the best data and with the best intentions, we may still be wrong, at least in part.

A few hundred years ago many believed that the sun revolved around the earth. They were wrong. Less than a century ago the brightest minds in Germany (basing their ideas on evolutionary theory) believed that “ethnic cleansing” was justifiable. They were wrong too. Half a century ago many biologists believed that complex biological information develops (and has developed) by chance. They are also most certainly wrong.

Yet it is not the fact of being wrong that is the problem. Most of us are at least partially wrong on our thinking much of the time. It is when we refuse to acknowledge our limitations and arrogantly insist that we are completely right that we blindly set the stage for disaster. This is what the ancients meant by the word hubris. Berry believes that a modern science based on this arrogant ignorance (and I might add displaying itself with intellectual rhetoric) “resembles much too closely an automobile being driven by a six-year-old or a loaded pistol in the hands of a monkey.”

In the 21st Century so many aspects of our lives are globally informed: the markets that drive our various employments, our entertainment, our digital communication, our politics. What scares me (and Wendell Berry) is the troubling reality that most of these far reaching pieces of our lives are managed by “experts” that don’t have all the answers.

Let me offer a bit of advice, if I may: beware of those with all the answers. We may naturally incline to those with seeming expertise. It gives a sense of security. But in most Areas of our lives, there are always exceptions and limitations to our generalizations and professed knowledge.

I work as a researcher in a large corporation. Our sales and marketing groups are constantly seeking answers - usually quick answers - to complicated questions. They want these answers to be straight forward and easily understood. They love it when a researcher, posing as someone with great authority, provides them with an absolute answer that they are happy with. This sort of answer does two things for them. It answers their question, and it also takes the responsibility of having to make a difficult decision. Who, after all, will go against and absolute statement of a scientist?

Yet this is not the wisest path forward. Much more to be trusted is the scientist that provides not only the answers that are supported by the data, but also provides a disclaimer on the limits of what is actually known, or even contradictions to the data (most people would be surprised at how much contradictory data exists for many things we consider to be fully understood). This kind of scientist is often not very popular, not only because he or she requires someone to make a possibly imperfect decision. But such a scientist also requires someone (or perhaps a group of people) to use wisdom. Someone has to be responsible.

This is the kind of person that Socrates pleaded with the Athenians to consider, all those years ago. There were far too many in his day that seemed to know everything, yet in the end they knew very little. Socrates was the only one who recognized that he did not have all the answers. Because he knew this, he also knew that his detractors didn’t know all that they claimed. He made a lot of enemies when this became apparent. In the end it cost him his life. The Athenians did not want to face the embarrassing reality of their own limitations. We are no different today.

Perhaps the most profound example of the limitation of intellectual rhetoric is found in the ninth chapter of John’s gospel. Here it is recorded that Jesus healed a blind man on the Sabbath. The Pharisees, upon learning this, were upset. They asked the man accusingly how it happened. They brought in his parents and examined them. Then they re-examined the man and cross examined him. The leading intellectuals of the day were absolutely convinced that this miracle could not have happened. It went totally against the logical framework they had built for themselves. But in the end they were wrong and they knew it. Against all their logic and informed reasoning they could not counter the basic fact insisted upon by this man “that, whereas I was blind, now I see.”

Some years later, after the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, the apostle Peter was faced with another master of intellectual rhetoric. His name was Simon Magus, a Samaritan, who claimed to be a higher god than the Creator Himself. Much of his appeal was due to his quick mind but there was also a compelling shock value that came from his alarming claims. Many who did not like him continued to follow him because of this. Much of his story and the many discussions that he had with Peter are found in the Recognitions of Clement where a version of his abilities can be seen. Simon is a prime example of intellectual rhetoric because he parallels many intellectuals today in the ability he had to out-reason any potential detractors and to go virtually unchallenged. Unchallenged, that is, until he confronted Peter, whose simple consistent and inspired reasoning he could not confound.

Today I worry that we have too few Peters that can stand up to the many clever intellectuals bearing scientific truths. Even knowing that science changes many of its conclusions with every generation, we continue to give the arguments (and their purveyors) carte blanche. As a result we continue facing our many challenges - both local and global challenges - with knee-jerk solutions that end up being far too costly. In the meantime we end up destroying lives, the earth, and the dignity that should be ours to enjoy.

One of Wendell Berry’s answers to this tragedy is that “the arts and sciences need to be made answerable to standards higher than those of any art or science.” Peter obviously had higher standards. Sadly our intellectual community often does not. They often make claims to pursue truth wherever it leads. But this is of little help when decisions are made with imperfect information; or worse, with myopic hubris. If we continue to follow the lead of intellectual rhetoric and the low standards (or no standards) that inform it, we will soon find ourselves being led down a path of complete confusion or complete cynicism - and easy prey to enemies within and without.

Our need for cultural renewal needs to begin now while it is still possible - and while we still have a culture to save. We need to be wise enough to see that this must happen from within ourselves as we make careful, deliberate and faithful decisions – looking both forward and backwards to gain equilibrium even while we look above for direction. It will certainly not come as a sudden gift from smart people, no matter how well-intentioned they might be.

References:

Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society was published by Basic Books in 2007. Wendell Berry’s essay The Way of Ignorance can be found in the thin volume of essays with the same title (and same author) published in 2005 by Shoemaker and Hoard. The story of Peter and Simon Magus and their several debates is in the Recognitions of Clement. My version is in Volume 8 of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, published by Hendrickson in 1994. Some of the Clementine literature has undoubtedly been modified but Simon was certainly a real detractor of the early Church and I expect that much of his personality can be perceived in what we have of Clement’s account.

The Prayer of Sacrifice

2011-05-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

There are many kinds of prayers. Some are short like a blessing on the food. Some are formulaic like the words used in an ordinance. Some are formal like a public invocation. Some are deeply personal like the cloistered pleading of a needy soul. None, however, is more significant as a means of approaching our Heavenly Father than a sincere prayer offered over an altar of sacrifice.

Surely, you must be thinking, I can’t be serious. Altars of sacrifice are thousands of years out of date. They may have been important in Old Testament times, but not today. Besides, Christianity is clear about the practice of sacrifice being replaced by baptism and the Sacrament (or the Eucharist).

And so it has been. But let us be clear on at least one point. The practice of animal sacrifice is only a part of the Law of Sacrifice, and this law was never intended to be superseded. With the exception of a few isolated Israelite enclaves (such as the Ethiopian Fallashas) animal sacrifice was indeed abandoned. But the religious truths it stood for were never changed. Joseph Smith’s statement that “a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto salvation.” Sacrifice needs very much to be a part of our contemporary worship - and prayer should be a part of that sacrifice, just like it was anciently.

I am not suggesting that we find a place in our backyards and start placing stones together into a pile. This would obviously be inappropriate and unnecessary. There are enough symbolic altars around for us to use. Some of these altars exist in temples, churches, and other meeting houses around the world. They can even exist in our homes. All that is needed is a willingness to give all that we have to God. Of course this is not a trivial thing, and a somnolent muttering of syllables is hardly the spirit intended. Because at the heart of the Law of Sacrifice – at the heart of giving all we have to God – is the giving up of our sins. A prayer before an altar of sacrifice is a plea for forgiveness. It has been this way from the beginning.

Anciently prayer was intimately associated with sacrifice. In fact the first references to prayer in the Bible involve altars. In Genesis 12:8 we read that when Abram (Abraham) came to a mountain near Bethel and pitched his tent that “he builded an altar unto the Lord, and called upon the name of the Lord.” An earlier reference to prayer (in Genesis 4:26) appears to stand alone (without an altar) until we read the same, yet expanded, narrative in the Book of Moses (Chapter 5:5-8) where Adam is commanded to offer the firstlings of his flocks for an offering unto the Lord. After many days an angel appears to Adam and commands him that he must also “repent and call upon God in the name of the Son forevermore.” In fact an earlier verse in Chapter 4 (verses 3-4, also in the Book of Moses) also shows the relationship of prayer to altars.

Later Solomon is recorded to have offered prayer before an altar with outstretched hands “And it was so, that when Solomon had made an end of praying all this prayer and supplication unto the Lord, he arose from before the altar of the Lord, from kneeling on his knees with his hands spread up to heaven” (I kings 8:54).

In the Book of Mormon account of the missionary efforts of the sons of Mosiah, it is recorded that many were brought to a “knowledge of the truth; yea, by the power of their words many were brought before the altar of God, to call on his name and confess their sins before him.” (Alma 17:4). And other examples exist throughout the standard works.

One of the important clues in these verses to the significance of these prayers is the use of the verb “to call”. These are not just prayers that are spoken. These are prayers that call upon God. Two-way communication is expected. A prayer before a sacrificial altar is intended to be a revelatory experience.

Hugh Nibley has pointed out that this sacrificial prayer was tied very early not just to revelation but also to divine instruction and the performing of ordinances. He translates a passage from Clement showing that “Adam finding he needed help, solicited divine assistance with prayers and sacrifice… That was the beginning of the ordinances of God.”

Some of this is evident in the remarkable story of Peter’s testimony in Matthew (Chapter 16). You may recall the remarkable passage where Peter testifies that Jesus is the Christ. This is followed by the famous reference that is interpreted so differently by Catholics, Protestants and Mormons: “thou art Peter and upon this rock will I build my church.” The Catholic tradition understands that Peter (Petros, meaning rock or stone) is the rock upon which the church will be founded. To other Christian faiths - including Mormons - the 2nd rock is in reference to revelation. And the words of Christ to Peter represent a double-entendre: Peter and the rock (petros) of revelation.

I do not disagree with this interpretation but I think it is missing something important - something centered on prayer, altars and sacrifice. Consider the setting: it is in the mountainous area near Caesarea Philippi. And consider the double entendre: Peter and the rock. One does not need much of an imagination to see a reference to temple worship here. Mountains are often used either as symbols of temples or as physical places where temples are located. Stones, of course, are what altars were made of.

I find it hard to believe that these elements are combined in this passage by accident, especially considering how things end. This stone upon which Christ’s church is to be built will prevail against the “gates of hell.” As Hugh Nibley pointed out several years ago, the “it” in the “gates of hell shall not prevail against it” is (in Greek) a partitive genitive. For Nibley this means that the gates of hell shall not prevail against those who are already there. The traditional interpretation, on the other hand, is a more difficult translation: the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church.

I believe that a more penetrating understanding of this reference (and one involving a more trenchant double meaning) is that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the altar of the temple. This interpretation (as well as Nibley’s) makes Peter’s revelatory experience a temple experience. It is intimately tied to the Law of Sacrifice.

Further evidence for this altar can be found in the following chapter (Mathew 17). It is here that Christ is again on the mountain with Peter, James and John. After Christ has been transfigured, and when Peter realizes the heavenly messengers that have been there, the leading apostle suggests that three tabernacles be built: one for Christ, one for Moses and one for Elias. Now the word “tabernacle” (the Greek skene) is easily overlooked. In the Old Testament it is often used for any kind of tent or dwelling. In the Matthew account it is different, especially given the sanctity of the setting and the messengers involved. Perhaps the clearest indication of what is intended is to refer to the Book of Hebrews (in the 8th and 9th chapters). Here the word “tabernacle” clearly refers to sacrifice and ordinances. Verse 2 (Chapter 8) reference is made to a “minister of a sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle which the Lord pitched, and not man. For every high priest is ordained to offer gifts and sacrifices…” in verse 3 (Chapter 9) we learn that the tabernacle “which is called the Holiest of all” is after the second veil in the temple where the golden censer and the Ark of the Covenant were kept.

Of course there is no proof of a physical altar of stones here but I think the evidence suggests that there was one. I do think, however, that at least one thing is quite clear in all of this: the Law of Sacrifice was intended to be a central part of an enduring Christianity, not a forgotten relict of its Jewish past.

Now this is a very different interpretation of what altars and sacrifice mean than the one accepted by the scholarly community. This view of animal sacrifice is that it evolved in prehistoric times among human hunting bands as a way of appeasing the arbitrary anger of the gods. Blood dripped on altar stones becomes a symbol of mankind’s reaction to his own inherent violence, not a symbol of repentance and redemption. To James Carroll (noted author of Constantine’s Sword) sacrifice is an evolutionary epiphenomenon that allowed primitive humans to deal with death. It “is the invention that aims to make sense of, and to restrict, violence.”

Such a view is naïve and far too simplistic. Carroll should know better. Claiming the deepest rituals of religion to be mere atavisms performed by primitive simpletons is a mockery at best. Placing animal flesh on an altar was, to earlier times, an act of giving one’s most valued possessions to God.

Nor was this sense lost in the early Christian church. Of course baptism and the sacrament came to replace animal sacrifice but this was not the end of making an offering of self to God - certainly an essential aspect of sacrifice. Stone altars were placed at the center of churches where, instead of partaking of animal flesh, worshippers partook of a token piece of bread instead. All the key elements of ancient expiatory sacrifice are still in place: a humble kneeling approach to God, a calling on His name, an offering of all one has (including the forsaking of one’s sins), a sacred meal that recognizes the supreme sacrifice of the Lamb of God.

All of this was never meant to be lost. But our ignorance of what it signifies has been a loss of tragic proportions to those truly seeking transformative truths. Certainly God, our Father, hears our simple prayers. But ultimately there is only one way back to His presence, and it is through the sacrifice of His Son. And it is worth remembering that there is a different kind of prayer that is meant to remember and acknowledge this all-important fact. It is a prayer of sacrifice.

References

Joseph Smith’s statement on sacrifice is in Lectures on Faith (6th lecture). It is not certain which sections of this formerly canonized work were written by the prophet himself, but all of the lectures were approved by him. For Nibley’s account of early Christian sacrificial prayers see The Early Christian Prayer Circle; in, Mormonism and Early Christianity (Volume 4 of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley). Nibley’s insights on the “the Gates of Hell” are in Baptism for the dead in Ancient Times (also in his Collected Works, Volume 4). Two sources dealing with the modern interpretation of animal sacrifice (which are misguided in my mind) are Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans, the Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, and James Carroll’s recent Jerusalem, Jerusalem.

Building

2011-04-26T17:10:00.000-07:00

I feel alone at times
Without the ego scaffolding
That used to keep me
Working on the walls

It’s left me quite exposed
Now that it’s gone
But there is much to do inside
And I’ve no further need to hide

Another Darwinian Fairytale

2011-04-16T09:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a new Just So story that Kipling would be proud of: Many years ago in the distant land of Africa a small troop of human-like primates emerged from the forest and noticed a herd of antelope nearby. "What a delicious dinner," grunted one of the apes. "Let's go get one." Whereupon the hirsute hominid picked up a stick and began running towards the herd.

Fortunately for the primate, the creatures weren't hard to catch. After all, this was a long time ago when animals weren't nearly as fast. And these antelope had never seen a two-legged monkey before and didn't think they were dangerous. At first the antelope just looked at the man with curiosity. Then when they could see that this novel being was coming right for them, they decided to run away. Sadly for them they didn't run fast enough and the man caught up with the oldest (and slowest) animal and beat it with a stick. That night the primates had meat for dinner.

Many years passed and the man-like beings kept chasing after the antelope. After a few generations they started raising children that were faster than normal. This was a promising development. They would be able to catch more antelope. But the antelope started getting faster too and so they had to be content with an escalating status quo.

As generations turned into millennia and millennia turned into a vague infinitude, the apes became humans and the man/antelope relationship became something truly unexpected. It involved vast amounts of time and evolutionary pressure. But the antelope came to run as fast as 50-60 miles an hour over short distances and the men, while not being able to run nearly as fast, could keep running for hours and could eventually run an antelope to the ground out of sheer persistence.

This, of course, is not a true story. Even so, amazing as it might seem, there are many people - including scientists, athletes, and the generally gullible public - that think it is. The whole scenario (with a lot more detail) has come to have a sophisticated name. It's called "persistence hunting". It is the newest evolutionary explanation of why humans are capable of running so fast and for so long.

The latest issue of Outside magazine (May 2011) has a story of a few marathon runners chasing American antelope just to see if it might be possible. Sadly, they failed, but not without coming close enough to make the whole thing seem plausible. Plausible, that is, to people who don't know any better. For in fact, the possibility of this sort of thing really happening is less likely than any of Kipling's famous stories.

For starters, antelope were not slow creatures all those many years ago. Lions, cheetahs, hyenas and their earlier ilk were happily pawing the African plain and were eager to chase any antelope too slow to get away. Even if our physical ancestors did emerge from the African forests, they would never have been fast enough to catch an antelope or have a chance of running one down. Besides, marathon runners are not the human norm. Even after millennia of this so-called evolutionary leg race, an average human being (not to mention somebody in good shape) would have no chance.

But you might argue that marathon runners prove otherwise. This is hardly true. Marathon runners are impressive, no doubt, but they are an example of highly trained individuals, not the average direction of our species. They have merely taken our existing human capabilities and pushed them to a limit. In a natural population this doesn’t happen because being well adapted to a certain place involves an entire suite of characteristics. You can’t over-emphasize one without affecting the others.

An antelope is not just adapted to run fast. It is also well adapted to eat the local plants, to blend into the landscape, to fight disease. If you emphasize just one trait, you sacrifice some of the others. This is one of the clearest lessons we have learned through hundreds of years of breeding plants and animals. This is why our domestic breeds almost never survive (or remain true breeds) when left on their own in the wild.

And besides antelope are not domestic breeds. Neither are the animals that hunt them. Surely we could capture lions and breed them for speed if we really wanted to. Such animals would be faster than the ones chasing wildebeest in the wild. But the truth remains that the changes caused by domestic breeders don't happen in nature - no matter how many of our evolutionary apologists try to convince us otherwise. Our many creative breeding programs (spanning millennia) have never been able to make an organism better able to survive in the natural world.

I don't mean to suggest that natural selection doesn't happen - of course it does. Over time, if there were enough environmental pressures acting upon us, we might become faster runners. But this hardly gets us past the huge gap between an arboreal monkey and the antelope-chasing human. Adaptable we may be. Inevitable products of primate evolution is another thing altogether.

Another point I would like to make is that these Just So stories are human-directed stories, just like all domestic breeding projects are human-directed stories of one kind or another. If there is any evolutionary significance in any of them it is that humans can manipulate nature - that we are capable of altering the Creation. Even a highly trained marathon runner is using his or her God-given agency to literally run against nature - of over-developing one capacity at the expense of others. No other species will do this. It’s easy enough to extrapolate from breeding projects to major evolutionary change but our only real point of departure in this sea of speculation is our given genetic endowment – with its remarkable (and limited) adaptability.

What the real prehistory of mortal man involves is a mystery to us all. And so I suppose that I should be more patient with these evolutionary stories. But when the narrative motivation becomes misanthropy and the meaning of human life becomes a mere reproductive calculation, I object. There are, I believe, reasons for our reason, and obvious clues to our conscience - Darwinian fancies notwithstanding.

Juvenile Delinquency and the Miracle of Marriage

2011-04-03T16:21:00.000-07:00

Last summer my nephew – I’ll call him Jay – came to live with us. He was in a great deal of trouble in another state and was being held by authorities because of his delinquent behavior. You see, Jay had missed the previous school year – all of it – because he decided he didn’t want to go to class. And then things went from bad to worse when he started taking illegal drugs.

Jay’s father died from a brain tumor over six years ago. When his mother took a job requiring her to leave home early each morning, Jay took advantage of the situation and stopped going to school. He always had a good excuse and his mother found it difficult to constantly argue with him.

So when school started last fall, Jay had to catch up on a full year of classes in a place he was unfamiliar with. Fortunately Fresno has a school targeting troubled students like Jay and we were able to get a curriculum together that met his needs. For us, however, we were understandably concerned about the influence Jay would have in our home. He was (is) sleeping in the same room as our son and next door to our daughter. When, just a couple of weeks after moving in, he was suspended from school for being caught with drugs, our concerns increased.

I sat down with Jay and told him that I wanted to be supportive and that I was willing to help him if I could. But I also let him know that I would not tolerate drugs in our home. If he made mistakes, I would work with him, but I would send him back to his former version of juvenile jail if he was ever caught with drugs again. I let him know that I could not be a responsible father and allow such things in my home.

Jay continued to struggle after this. But he did manage to stay drug free. One day we received a call from one of his teachers. He told us that Jay was in trouble. Kathy hurried over to school, quietly walked into his class and sat in the back. She didn’t have to say anything but Jay learned that we were serious about his behavior at school.

Then there were times when he would just disappear and go visit one of his friends from school. This didn’t seem like a big deal to Jay. We weren’t his real parents, after all, and what’s the harm of having friends? When I explained to him that I had no way of trusting anybody from a school filled with delinquent youth, he began to see my point.

Part of the trouble was that our home is quite boring for youth. We have strict (limited) rules about television and computer use. We also lack most popular electronic games. We rely on good books, outdoor activities and the occasional DVD for entertainment. It took some time for Jay to adapt to this.

In fact we all had to adapt to our new situation. This was particularly difficult at times when Jay tried to cover up his misbehavior. For me, a big challenge was taking an hour after school to help him with his homework. This was time I normally dedicated to my own studies. Kathy had more errands to run, more laundry to do and a much bigger culinary responsibility. Jay is, after all, a big boy.

That said, there were also a number of things that came together that helped Jay give up his bad habits. In fact, Jay has not only changed a few habits, he has changed from a sad and rebellious boy into a caring and trustworthy young man. And it is this change that prompts me to write this essay and become a little philosophical about his situation.

A simple example might illustrate this change. Several months ago, Jay would occasionally do something wrong around the house. He would then try to cover it up. He didn’t think we knew he was guilty. After troubling myself about how to deal with this dishonesty, I finally taught him of the importance of admitting mistakes in a non-threatening context. I told him that I would not be hard on him if he admitted his mistakes before being caught.

Several months passed and then one day on the way to the gym, Jay told me that he had either misplaced a school book or someone had stolen it. Either way he would need to pay for it. I was extremely proud of Jay for this confession and I could tell that he was changing. A couple of days later he was quite pleased to tell me that the book had been found.

As of today, more than seven months since he first arrived, Jay has no more desire to be rebellious. He has overcome his craving for drugs. He participates actively and with pleasure at church (where he refused to be involved before). He even getting out of bed an hour early in order to attend an early morning scripture study class for youth (we call it Seminary). His new friends are upstanding individuals that we are comfortable with. What is really impressing his mother is that he is doing well in all his classes (getting A’s and B’s). He has even been recognized as a star student by his teachers.

One thing that helped Jay get his mind off of his problems was his developing interest in insects. I am an entomologist and keep a collection of my own at home, and Jay and I were able to take several weekends off to go collecting. We still do. For Christmas, Jay got a kit to start his own collection. He now knows all the major orders, many families and even the full scientific names of several local species. He has even been invited to talk to elementary schools on the subject and is being recognized as a bit of an authority by some of his peers. He takes pride in this.

Another very positive effect has been Jay’s Seminary teacher. She is a woman that has refused to judge him negatively. Instead she has been very supportive. Her most noticeable characteristic is an unconditional love for others (along with a talent for making great cookies!). She has had a tremendous influence in helping Jay change his view of organized religion. Where he used to see religious youth as brainwashed hypocrites, he now sees them as friends struggling with their own problems and needing each other’s support.

Jay’s transformation has been truly remarkable and yet I am not sure I can put my finger on what has been the most important part in this change. I have become keenly aware of the studies surrounding fatherless boys and of the great impact that a father figure (even a poor one) has on these youth. I am certainly convinced that this is a social issue requiring our determined attention.

Yet I can’t pinpoint any single thing that anybody has done that is clearly the most important element in this change. I fail to see the direct relationship between my own existence in Jay’s life as a father figure (considered in isolation) and his remarkable change. To be honest, my direct involvement has not been that extensive. It consists of being present at dinner, for our family devotional, and for an occasional family discussion. Occasionally I will sit down with Jay one on one. But Jay no longer needs my help with homework and our routine family life has been resumed, with the exception that he is willing to help with our family chores.

To what then do I owe this great change? My answer – given after much thought - is that it is the home environment surrounding a committed marriage. This is an environment that I often take for granted. It is also an environment that can often be invisible because of the frustrations of making a living, keeping up with family responsibilities, and just living life.

But there is an order that inheres to a traditional marriage whether we see it or not. Certainly the absence of the father can cause far-reaching harm. But it requires the combination of a father and a mother to create an environment of healthy growth and development. For in fact, the true wonderment of Jay’s transformation is that no one has changed Jay. He has rather found a place where his true nature can manifest itself. He is, at heart, a caring and responsible young man. He just needed a place (just like all of us do) where he could learn to be himself.

What I have learned is a simple but profound truth about human nature. We don’t need to force good behavior onto our children or the youth of our communities. They will each grow in to the beautiful individual that is inherently a part of their natures if the environment is right for that growth. They will grow toward the light that resonates with their own light. We just need to make sure the light is visible. More than we might realize, this happens in a traditional home. In fact it is difficult for it to happen anywhere else. It happens through the miracle of marriage.

Winter Peas in Fresno

2011-03-23T16:48:00.000-07:00

Last year on October 24th I planted a handful of peas in my small backyard garden plot in Fresno. I also planted a few cabbage and spinach seeds. I wanted to see if these vegetables, that are known to be frost-tolerant to a degree, would make it through a Fresno winter and provide me with an off-season crop to rotate with my summer tomatoes. You can see for yourself how well they managed.

This picture was taken about a week ago and we are now enjoying fresh peas. The first few I harvested a couple of weeks ago were a bit weather-worn. The more abundant crop this week is soft and very tasty - a real treat. What is remarkable is that I have done next to nothing to care for these plants. The cool winter weather of the Central Valley seems to be just what these peas need to grow. The 12 inches of precipitation this winter has been plenty. I only watered the seeds right after planting and then have let the rains take of the rest.

I did help out with nutrition; not artificial fertilizers mind you, but a healthy layer of homemade compost covered with flat stones around the young seedlings. I added the compost to improve the soil and the stones to keep back the weeds and to foster a nicer environment for the earthworms and helpful arthropods. A couple of months ago (in January) I turned over one of the stones and was happy to see a couple of fat worms and a few baby earwigs - along with several isopods (a.k.a. potato bugs). Another benefit of the peas is that (being legumes) they are busy making nitrogen available for my next crop.

I did notice early-on a couple of nibbled leaves near the ground where some unwanted creature was eating my plants. After my initial concern, I decided to leave them alone. With the few predatory ground beetles that I had seen running around the stones I hoped that whatever guilty creature was feeding on the plants would not get out of hand. So far I have been right.
You can also see the cabbages I planted at the same time as the peas. They are doing fine but have not grown as much. This surprised me a little. I was actually expecting them to do better with the cold than the peas but I was wrong. I'm going to have to wait several more weeks before they're ready to eat.

The spinach really hasn't been a good test. I planted the seeds in the lowest part of the garden and they got flooded on several occasions when it rained hard. I may experiment with them next winter.

For the small garden that I have, being able to multiply crops is one way to maximize the use of limited resources. But there are also real benefits from small gardens. I have an abundance of compost and my yields are much higher than commercial growers. My plants are also completely in their element. Since taking the picture, they have added several more inches to each tip and have become top-heavy, falling over into the adjacent rows - the pea equivalent to inebriation, I'm sure. Worm castings are piling up around the stones and spring is well under-way.

This is a bit unusual for most gardeners, I know. The common wisdom is to plant peas sometime in March, recognizing that they can take a little frost. I've heard that even on very cold nights, they can survive if covered in snow - or under a light compost no doubt. Planting in March might be a good idea for northerners. But for the citizens of Fresno planting so late would be a shame. Why plant in March when you can be eating peas in March. My advice to anybody with mild winters is to plant peas in October.

Honor Codes, Chivalry and Human Nature

2011-03-09T18:59:00.000-08:00

Last week Brigham Young University (BYU) sports fans (including myself) were disappointed with the news that Brandon Davies was suspended from the school’s basketball team. The young man had violated the school’s honor code that does not allow premarital sex.

Davies was a starting forward for the team that was reaching the end of its regular season schedule with a remarkable record of 27 wins and only 2 losses. Just prior to Davies’s suspension the team was ranked 3rd nationally and anticipated getting a number 1 bid to the post-season NCAA tournament. The game following his suspension, BYU suffered an embarrassing loss that seemed to presage the end of the team’s success.

Commentators across the country have been mixed in their responses. Many have commended the school for holding to its standards (even though many don’t agree with them). Others have complained that such moral requirements are unrealistic in the modern world where premarital sex is the norm. Nobody, however, seems to be paying much attention to what it means to have honor codes in the first place – especially honor codes that affect athletic programs. But the issue is a significant one. It involves the question of who we are as human beings. Are we animals only, or are we something more?

From an evolutionary perspective sports are usually understood to be a sort of catharsis for the human tendency of aggression and war. Men in particular are adapted to defend themselves and their families and have an innate drive to be aggressive – or to compete. Human societies, especially those that include cities where people live in close proximity to each other, need to have a way of diffusing this latent aggressive urge. Athletic games are a way of doing this.

One of the obvious ways that this works is because there are rules. If humans were only capable of following animal instincts, athletic games would not be possible. This doesn’t mean that animals don’t play or engage in mock battles – they do. We are all familiar with the tumbling antics of wrestling puppies. But athletic games are different. They involve rules that are learned, not just instincts.

But they also involve more than just rules - or at least they used to. Tradition has it that the ancient Olympic Games were initiated because of a religious desire to honor the gods and restore peace. Modern athletic games have also developed from a code of honor. I refer to the medieval code of chivalry.

It is well understood that medieval knights served a military purpose. It is also accepted that they were defenders of Christianity, and of women and children. When they engaged in tournaments they were competing in games of war but with strict rules of engagement. They also acknowledged that they were defending a higher ideal. This was evident in their respect for the cross and in their recognition of women. We recall in Sir Walter Scott’s chivalric novel Ivanhoe how the disinherited knight (winner of a regal tournament) honors the Lady Rowena as the Queen of Love and Beauty.

This was not just an imaginative literary invention of Scott. A real code of honor existed that knights were supposed to live by. It dated at least from the time of Charlemagne and is memorialized in the Song of Roland where 17 knightly virtues are mentioned such as: to fear God and maintain His church, to protect the weak and defenseless, to give succor to widows and orphans, to despise pecuniary reward, to keep faith, to respect the honor of women, never to turn the back upon a foe, etc.

In this time of knightly honor, manliness was acknowledged as an extension of spiritual strength. In fact it was through spiritual power that the knight rightly drew for strength. As David O. McKay was famous for saying (half a century ago), “spirituality … is the consciousness of victory over self and of communion with the infinite.”

Unfortunately, we hardly remember anymore the chivalric beginning of modern sports. It doesn’t serve our purposes anyway. Chivalry was all about men and their need to defend faith, women and children – hardly worthy motives to the modern world.

It is much easier to accept the evolutionary explanation of sports as martial catharsis and leave it at that. Or, more realistically, we ignore the history and science altogether and just play games for the fun of it.

But this only gets us into trouble. It leaves us morally and culturally ungrounded. When we ignore who we really are – that we have both animal and divine natures – sporting events become nothing more than the glorified human version of a spat of fighting monkeys. Winning is the only thing that matters and working oneself into a froth of aggression is accepted and even applauded. Democratic man, it seems, is ever willing to behave like the beasts.

Yet it goes without saying that there is no honor for a victorious beast. Maybe he wins a mate (the so-called highest goal of evolutionary fitness) or scares off a rival. But he remains a beast.

And so it is with us. Our world has forgotten where it came from. It no longer wishes to acknowledge its historic faith and the dignity that comes from honoring the divine part of human nature. Yet this forgetfulness comes with a price, a diminishment of who we are. Games without codes of honor are no more able to dignify man than are the carnal hysterias of mobs.

So whether or not BYU wins any more games this year, it has already won the more important test. It has insisted that honoring noble rules – shall we say chivalric rules – is more important than mere mortal victories. Honor means more than the madness of crowds. And the victory of self is a far greater achievement than just winning a game.

References

Girouard, Mark. 1982. The Return to Camelot, Chivalry and then English Gentleman. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

McKay, David O. Conference Report 1969; in, Teachings of the Presidents of the Church, David O. McKay. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Scott, Sir Walter. Ivanhoe. The Easton Press (1977 edition).

Sipes, Richard E. 1973. War, Sports and Aggression: An Empirical Test of Two Rival Theories. American Anthropologist 75(1): 64-86.

Sustainability and the GMO Myth

2011-02-25T16:45:00.000-08:00

Almost everybody agrees that we should be wiser with our resources. Most of us also agree that a worthy measure of this goal is sustainability. To this end, people with very different personal and political commitments are working together in local communities to recycle trash, conserve water and save energy, etc.

Studies regularly show that consumers prefer buying certified lumber and pesticide-free food if the price is right. And with the price of gas continuously rising, fuel efficient vehicles are clear favorites on the market.

It’s no wonder that agricultural companies have an interest in promoting a corporate image of sustainability as well. It pays, after all. And such an image is desperately needed in an industry that struggles to keep intact an aura of environmental integrity.

I joined the agriculture industry in 1991 working for a small environmentally conscious company named AgriDyne Technologies. We developed a natural insecticide from the seeds of the Asian neem tree. Our competitors were a handful of like-minded enthusiasts focused on making money by a safer use of natural resources - of being sustainable. These efforts, all combined, have made only a limited impact in the Ag industry. And it wasn’t until the major Ag businesses took up the torch of sustainability that the message became more visible.

One of the first real corporate statements of this kind came in 1997 in a Harvard Business Review interview with Robert Shapiro (then CEO of Monsanto). Entitled Growth Through Global Sustainability, Shapiro outlined the need for agribusiness to develop in a sustainable way if it hoped to avoid disaster and at the same time feed an ever growing world population. Since Shapiro’s interview other major agricultural companies began promoting their own brands of sustainability too.

Monsanto had a lot to gain from this message. With a history replete with environmental negligence (including the disaster of Agent Orange in Vietnam, corruption during the dioxin “catastrophe” at Seveso, and the misuse of data in the Bovine Growth Hormone Affair, etc.) it had recently discovered a promising new direction: genetically modified organisms (or GMO’s).

What made these GMO’s so nice was the appearance of sustainability that they created. They promised to reduce the rate of toxic chemicals in the environment (by containing them within the crop itself). They also promised to reduce soil erosion (by allowing no-till farming with their premier herbicide Roundup).

Of course there are many other components needed in a truly sustainable environment: renewable energy, biodiversity, water conservation, etc. But the two pieces Monsanto promoted were a good place to start, and the company has been successful in promoting them, or at least in part.

Now over a decade later, enough time has passed to see how truly sustainable the GMO revolution has been. Sad to say, it hasn’t been. I don’t mean it hasn’t made Monsanto a lot of money - it has. I do mean that the industry is no closer to creating sustainable growth than it was in the 90’s.

The most obvious cause of GMO failure has been insect and weed resistance. The cotton bollworm, for example, can no longer be controlled consistently with GMO cotton, especially in the Southeastern US. Resistance has also been detected in India.

More importantly, there are now a number of weeds (such as pigweed, horseweed, and giant ragweed) that can’t be controlled with Roundup - Monsanto’s blockbuster herbicide and driver of many GMO varieties (that were made so that Roundup could be sprayed over the top of them without harm). Because of resistance, an increasing amount of chemical inputs are required. There is no evidence that the GMO promise has reduced chemical use in the least. In fact, chemical use has actually increased.

In the meantime, millions of acres of GMO corn, soybeans, wheat, etc. are planted worldwide with claims that their use will revolutionize the landscape of global food production and overcome hunger. Sadly, these claims have been seriously misleading - not only because of resistant weeds and increasing chemical use but also because of the loss of crop diversity that the GMO revolution is causing – a loss that strikes at the heart of sustainability.

A classic example of how this happens is in Mexico where GMO corn has disrupted the centuries-old agricultural practices in the heartland of corn diversity.

In the Oaxaca region over 150 local varieties of corn are grown. These have been developed through traditional methods of crop selection and cross-fertilization. Individual families have generations of knowledge invested in these crops and they can be counted on to breed true – or at least true enough to sustain the communities growing the corn and to perpetuate the local varieties.

Unfortunately an increasing number of these varieties are being contaminated by the genes of GMO corn that have been transferred by wind-blown pollen from far away. This threatens the traditional agriculture in a couple of ways. The most immediate is that the genetic contaminants are patented and recognized internationally as somebody’s property - somebody’s, that is, except the local farmers.

But perhaps more serious is the unpredictability of the GMO’s themselves, which are made in a very random process. The manipulated genes that provide “advantages” to a plant can, and do, show up in all sorts of places in the host DNA. Some arrangements seem to show no significant changes to a plant’s appearance. Other arrangements, however, produce truly monstrous phenotypes. What sort of effect might this contamination have on these local communities? Nobody knows.

Of course, this sort of thing might never get out of hand. Perhaps local plant breeders could eliminate the harmful genes over generations. In the meantime, however, it is not wise to pursue a poorly understood technology when so much is at stake. This is just one example of the conflicting sustainability claims of GMO’s.

This may all seem like a science fiction fantasy with its cutting edge technology and impending global disaster. In fact literary entrepreneurs have not been blind to this opportunity. James Rollins’s recent thriller The Doomsday Key is an excellent example. The story centers on a cryptic guild of early Europeans and a fictional corporate giant called Viatus that are tied up in the use of GMO’s to reduce the world’s human population. US secret service agents end up discovering the threat that was taken from an ancient secret surrounding the medieval Doomsday Book. Of course many parts of this story are clearly unrealistic. Some however are not far fetched. The reality is that we don’t know how much of such a scenario is fantastic and how much might actually occur.

One thing we do know, however – or at least we should know – involves the biggest error in all of the GMO sustainability claims: the justification that a larger population needs more food.

At first blush this might seem obvious. The human population is growing at an alarming rate. Certainly the ever-increasing number of people will need to have something to eat. Claiming otherwise seems like an outright admission of misanthropy.

Robert Shapiro went so far as to suggest that a failure to embrace this vision of sustainability would relegate the world to starvation - or to use his own sarcasm: “letting the Malthusian process work its magic on the population”.

The mistake that Shapiro makes here is a big one. Sadly it is a mistake that far too many people make - even people that should know better. Population growth rises to the level of available resources. It is not an independent factor. Malthus was clear on this.

The truth of the matter is that agricultural technology is the primary cause of population growth, not an ancillary science struggling to keep up with it. Shapiro’s claim that Monsanto’s vision is required to feed a hungry world is exactly backwards. It is causing population growth.

Now I am not arguing that we should go back to the dark ages - giving up all our technology - in order to starve the world into a level of fewer people. I am arguing that a blind acceptance of industrial solutions is misguided. Making more and more food is not the answer. Helping more and more people make their own food, is.

Several years ago Barry Commoner pointed out the counter-intuitive relationship between population growth on the one hand and education and health care on the other. Places with higher education and better health care have lower levels of population growth. It has also been shown that open markets contribute to this same trend and improve living conditions for the greater good. But there is a big danger when we presume to take global responsibility. It’s all too easy to move from the ethics of democratic capitalism (sensu Michael Novak) to a presumed virtue of global industry (sensu Monsanto et al.). And it is in this failed transition that we make serious mistakes that make us less sustainable, not more so.

The current state of affairs will only bring more and more technology to developing countries that enrich the major global industries, making poorer peoples more and more dependent, and driving them away from the land and their best hope for true sustainability. More people will migrate to urban areas creating even larger cities with larger slums and greater hunger. It doesn’t take an Old Testament prophet to see all this happening.

If, however, we stop dragging local farmers into our version of the global economy, they will adopt those technologies that make sense to them. Local businesses will succeed, local people will live more dignified lives. Food may be relatively more expensive, but this is not the major problem that it seems. Simple clean housing in developing countries has never been the 30-year burden that it is to us in the developed world. Through the entire history of the planet people have lived fulfilled lives by farming - by spending more resources than we do on food. What may be surprising is that these “higher” priced foods tend to be less processed, and arguably healthier than the cheap diets foisted upon us by industrial society. The fact is that rising food prices becomes a serious problem primarily for those that don’t raise their own food. Those who do somehow manage to get by.

We can create a better world - a more sustainable world. But it won’t happen with an industrial mindset or with industrial tools. It will happen when we stop imposing ourselves on to our poorer neighbors and start focusing our efforts at home. If industry wants to be a true contributor to the problems facing us, let it help local communities become sustainable (without strings attached to global markets). Let it help motivate more people to take up farming, even to the point of empowering small farmers. We need to build soil, save energy, conserve water, and care for our own biotas locally. But claiming that we can save the world using self-serving technologies and economies that we don’t even understand is a recipe for disaster.

References

Commoner, Barry. 1988 Ecology and Social Action; In, The Conservators of Hope. University of Idaho Press, Moscow, Idaho.

Magretta, Joan. 1997. Growth Through Global Sustainability: An Interview with Monsanto’s CEO, Robert B. Shapiro. Harvard Business Review, January-February.

Novak, Michael. 1982. The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Touchstone, New York.

Robin, M.-M. 2008. The World According to Monsanto. The New Press, New York.

Rollins, James. 2009. The Doomsday Key. Harper, New York, New York.

A Wintry Book Foray

2011-02-09T16:50:00.000-08:00

The day after I arrived in Dallas an arctic atmosphere the size of a continent repositioned itself over the United States in the shape of an inverted parabola, its southern limit extending to the middle of Texas.

Temperatures dropped over 30 degrees within a couple of hours and all of the Dallas / Fort Worth area was glazed over with snow and ice. Several of my colleagues (who had arrived for the same scientific meetings that I was attending) were unable to sleep because of the constant clapping of sleet against the large parietal windows of their rooms.

Periodically throughout the next day power went out in the hotel as the city's faltering electricity was portioned out in cycles to its many stranded citizens. For, in fact, very few people were willing to brave the storm and drive to work. As a result the hotel was only half staffed and services were limited.

One is justified in wondering why a middle-aged Californian would wish to trek out in this weather. Certainly not after food, there was plenty of that in the hotel. Not even entertainment, the need of exercise or the promise of interesting insects (all hunkering down beneath the ice) would suffice.

The only possible reason left was books. And that was precisely the pull. Two years ago I had discovered a nice used bookstore (called Half-Price Books) on the other side of town and I was determined to visit it again.

I knew the trip would be tricky as soon as I stepped out of the hotel. The parking lot looked like shattered glass with patches of crusty snow throughout. After slowly making my way to the other side I came to the lawn. The snow had all but covered it up leaving only little tips of grass visible on top. Glad as I was to be free of the parking lot, I stepped with confidence onto the congealed turf only to realize (too late as it turned out) that it was harder than I thought.

Instead of gaining purchase, my unsuspecting foot glanced out from under me and slid to the bottom of the hill pulling me along with it. Fortunately it wasn't too steep or too far to the bottom. The worst thing that happened was the loss of my travelling snack - a Snickers bar - that I had slipped into my coat pocket. In the excitement of the fall I didn't even detect that it was gone until it was too late to go back and get it.

Now, however, I was aware of what I was up against. No more thoughtless or over-confident steps would do. I would have to make the four mile trek with tiny steps. Ahead of me the metropolitan floor extended in a patchwork of blacktop, concrete and little sections of frozen plants. The prospects weren't promising for any of these and so I tried the grass again. This time I gently eased my full weight into a square inch of my shoe. Thankfully it was enough (well maybe it was obviously enough) to break the crusty surface and I stood triumphantly secure.

Thus I plodded over lawns and pansy (poor things) past sidewalk and business until I discovered the remarkable value of poor masonry - concrete curbs, to be precise, which projected unprofessionally above the level of the walk. For some reason they were left un-iced and when there was a lull in the traffic (which was most of the time since nobody in their right mind was on the street) I ventured to balance my way along more easily.

Occasionally I would come upon a parking lot with patches of lovely black footholds. These I would navigate much like an old man playing hopscotch. And in fact it really was fun. I also became quite adept at noticing just slightly uneven surfaces. Failure in this regard could have been a serious problem where walks and driveways sloped ever-so-subtly into the four-lane street.

Unfortunately there were places that became quite difficult, like the entire block I had to manage between a row of crepe myrtles and a metal fence; or the extended driveway that was seemingly as smooth as glass. Very often I was left looking for any irregularity in the ice that I could find - like small pebbles or the frozen reliquiae of animals.

It was while I was inching my way along that I realized half of the stores around me were closed. What if the bookstore was closed too? I wondered. It couldn't be. Besides I was now over an hour along and couldn't bear the thought of turning back empty-handed.

I had been motivating myself through this wintry adventure by the thought of fine books. Now I seemed on the verge of distraction. But what was I to do? I was over half-way there. I couldn't stop now.

And so I mustered my tiring determination once again and kept walking. But in my worries I had failed to pay close enough attention to my footwork. Instead of tiny steps I had lapsed into my more comfortable lope and suddenly I slipped. My right foot raced to the side and my right hip instinctively pirouetted an instantaneous 90 degrees. My left foot shifted into a new position while my left knee flexed and tightened. My back arched forward like an amateur tight-rope-walker hovering over the abyss. Miraculously I remained standing.

And then I started to laugh out loud. How foolish I must have looked, flailing my body around in jocular abandon. But it didn't matter. The black plastic hood of my jacket was cinched tight around my head. I was certain that nobody could recognize me.

So I continued to laugh and walk and sniffle with joy, imagining how happy I would be to find a friendly book.

And so it was I found my favorite Texas store - humble though it is. And it was open, while most of the neighboring windows were dark. In the Natural History section I found an expensive cricket book for a song. I found Ernst Mayr's last book for a couple of dollars. In the regional section I found the essays I'd been looking for (for years) at a reasonable price. And then the cashier announced that because of bad weather, the store would be closing soon. I couldn't help believe that they had remained open just for me.

But now I had a problem I hadn't previously considered. I had a bag of books; no gloves and a long way still to go. Now if I fell, I would have to decide what to do with my hands. I could use them to break my fall (thus dropping the bag) or I could hold on to my package and deal with the bruises. In the end I couldn't make up my mind - and, in fact, it made no difference. I still had to start walking.

At the first crosswalk from the store I noticed an old beat-up truck spinning its tires. A middle-aged woman was pushing it from the back and her young friend was driving and cursing in the front seat. They had been out rummaging for discarded metal to recycle and got a flat tire. I helped them push their vehicle on to flat ground where the jack could be maneuvered without sliding. It wasn't easy pushing it on ice. Not until I found a foot grip on the curb did we make any progress. After managing as best we could I bid them a hearty "good luck" while silently hoping they weren't out on darker errands - along streets of abandoned shops.

The cloudy day was now turning into a cloudy dusk. Only a couple of cars were left in the vast acreage of a mall's parking lot. I moved along in controlled slides and then found a covered parking area with no ice. There was a cold breeze funneling through but the dry ground was a dream-come-true. I felt like walking around in circles to get the full benefit of secure footing but finally convinced myself that this was a waste of energy. And so I worked my way back to the snow and the tiny careful steps. There were still thousands to take - one after another - soon becoming a habit. Finally I was back before the hotel where I had fallen. On the ground was my candy bar - now frozen but untouched and intact. My cheeks were as ruddy as ever and my hands and arms were locked into a book-embracing rigor. But all was well. I pulled the hood off my head, breathed in the freezing air and walked anticlimactically into the lobby: a silent successful adventurer.

Some of my colleagues were standing around in idle chitchat. I nodded their way and smiled, feeling somehow above such sybaritic comforts. But then again, in a matter of minutes I would be in a warm bed reading.

The Meaning of Kitzmiller v. Dover

2011-01-24T18:08:00.000-08:00

Six years ago last December in the celebrated case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Judge John E. Jones III decided that a school board in south central Pennsylvania (in the town of Dover) could not make Intelligent Design (ID) literature available to its students. In fact the decision was initially praised as a landmark handling of the difficult science and religion controversy. A well-written account of the case, including valuable background information, has been written by Gordy Slack in, The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything. Slack is a popular writer on evolutionary themes and clearly places himself in the evolution camp but his book is usually fair. (At least the biases are obvious.)

Nearly a year later we learned that Judge Jones wasn’t nearly as informed on the science presented in the case as he should have been. As it turns out, he copied the bulk of the scientific argument in his written decision from documents provided to him by the ACLU before the trial even started. This is quite significant considering the fact that the ACLU was also providing legal help to the plaintiffs. What makes the copying so pathetic is that it suggests that the judge was not well enough informed to detect differences in the creationist arguments of his ACLU report and the arguments of ID that were presented in court.

I’m guessing that Slack was unaware of this finding when his book went to press, although this is giving him the benefit of the doubt. The Center for Science and Culture broke the story in December, 2006. Slack’s book was published in May, 2007 giving him time to have learned of the judge’s misbehavior. But since one never knows how long publishers hold on to manuscripts, it is possible that Slack was in the dark. The latest reference I could find in his Notes was to a website posting for January, 2007.

The case is an important one in America’s ongoing culture war. And the negative ruling against ID has had significant impact. The full effect of Judge Jones foul play may not be known for years but in the meantime a few things need to be reconsidered.

A good place to start is to rethink what the meaning of Kitzmiller should be. My take from Slack’s account is that the real issue in Dover was the religious motives of the school board. On this point I think the ruling was fair although ultimately unconstitutional. This may be a difficult position to hold, but let me explain.

Slack’s account makes it clear that the school board had little understanding of the science behind ID. Several of the early statements indicated strong fundamentalist positions against anything differing from its own brand of Christianity. This is clearly not the kind of environment where open enquiry can thrive. And as Slack shows, these professed Christians were caught in deceptive acts of dishonesty as the trial progressed, leaving one to only guess at the potential for manipulation from the erstwhile school board itself.

However, the case that was officially presented was about the right to have literature available for students to read. Textbooks containing a discussion of ID were to be placed in the library and a statement was to be read in class informing the students that they were available.

There was no pressure in this process from teachers or from anybody else. There is certainly nothing here that comes close to an establishment of religion one way or another. To suggest that putting a scientific book in a high school library violates the 1st Amendment is like saying that celebrating Martin Luther King Day does too - since the civil rights leader was a Christian preacher. This just stretches things too far.

Now perhaps you might take offense at my referring to ID as a science, so let me explain. During the trial, Kenneth Miller was asked by the Plaintiffs to define science. He did so by saying that it is an attempt to “provide natural explanations for natural phenomena”. I think this is a fully acceptable definition for experimental science but it hardly can be considered a complete definition for all science. It is similar to some of the definitions we find in various educational standards around the country. But it lacks a key element that has always been a part of science: namely observation. An earlier definition of science from the Kansas Science Standard that Miller has commented on reads: “Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us”. This is a much better definition but Miller decided against using it in Dover.

My advanced degrees (M.S. and Ph.D.) are both in a branch of evolutionary biology known as systematic zoology – which has been called the “science of diversity”. A large part of my research is descriptive. For example, I describe the morphology and biology of animals. Now this sort of research is not experimental per se. Even so, it has been considered a science from as long as we have been calling anything science. As a matter of fact, descriptive biology is the oldest science we have. To consider otherwise would require kicking Linnaeus out of our biology classes.

What makes descriptive biology so important is that it serves as a base from which other sciences work. For example, knowing how to tell the difference between a malaria-vectoring mosquito and a benign mosquito can be tricky but without this kind of knowledge advances in medicine and public health are limited. This argument also holds true for ecology, agriculture and many other sciences.

From my perspective, the current research centered on irreducible complexity (and ID) is similarly descriptive. It may not be providing “natural explanations” for how this complexity came about, but the identification of this complexity by itself is a net gain in our understanding of life. It is a base of information that can be accessed by many other disciplines in the future, even by those who wish to argue against ID.

This importance of observation is recognized by the National Academy of Science. In fact the very first paragraph in the introduction of its influential publication Science and Creationism makes this clear: “Science is a particular way of knowing about the world. In science, explanations are limited to those based on observation and experiments that can be substituted by other scientists...”

I am a bit surprised that Miller decided against using this definition – coming as it does from our most eminent scientific body. It is particularly surprising because it was written for the primary reason of bolstering the claims of science against the rising influence of “creation science”.

But the problem for Miller and the other Plaintiffs in Dover is that this definition isn’t sufficient to keep ID out of the halls of science. So instead of being embarrassed by this ambiguity, Miller chose a different definition, or so it seems.

Of course I may be wrong but a lot depends on definitions – especially in court. The larger issue, however, is that arguing over what is and what is not science has a long history of getting us nowhere. Philosopher Larry Laudan has traced this history in some detail.

Over two thousand years ago Aristotle argued that logical demonstration was the key element in scientific findings. In the pre-modern era it was determined that a more robust understanding of science would involve a particular method. Accordingly the scientific method was used as the defining ingredient.

When this definition proved imperfect, philosophers decided that science needed to be verifiable. Later still this perspective was altered so that scientific data and conclusions would be generally falsifiable instead. And there have been other definitions that could be added to this brief list.

Laudan comes to the conclusion that science should be determined by the credibility of the data and not the “scientific” status of the claims. He originally made these observations in 1983 and they are just as important now (if not more so) in the wake of the Kitzmiller case. This bickering over he meaning of science may have kept creation science out of the classroom. It will not work indefinitely for ID.

So what should be the meaning of Dover? My answer is that three things stand out.

The first one is that Judge Jones was right in identifying an underlying religious antagonism against evolution among members of the Dover Area School Board. It certainly appears that the level of scientific misinformation was becoming a problem and I think the judge made the right decision in this local area at the time of the trial.

However my other points suggest that Judge Jones will go down in history as an activist judge who was not capable of handling his most visible case. I say this because ID cannot be truthfully taught and be seriously considered a breach of the 1st Amendment (my 2nd point); and, because ID also makes observations of reality that can indeed be verifiable – and that fall under the umbrella of science (my 3rd point).

But I would like to make one final point that has significance well beyond the Kitzmiller case. It is that we are at a critical point in this conflict that requires a reasoned tolerance between both parties.

In this highly charged debate, a lack of understanding can become disastrous. Zealous biases that remain uninformed lead to dogmatism. And dogmatism, as Huston Smith has explained, is a character disorder. Even worse, it can destroy public order. This may sound like I’m being critical of conservative Christians. And in fact I am, in part. But the argument goes both ways. There is far too much dogmatism coming from the materialist camp as well. And its refusal to understand the basic Christian concerns in this issue can only make things worse.

Let’s face it. Both sides have legitimate concerns. The Plaintiffs in Kitzmiller, like thousands of other Americans that value the scientific method, were (and are) deeply concerned about the anti-intellectual tendencies that misinformed fundamentalists threaten to impose upon our children. It doesn’t matter that ID is good science (and I am arguing that it is). There are many vocal bigots that are downright scary to people trying to maintain a balanced position in this debate.

On the other hand, the defendants in the case have very legitimate concerns of their own. Materialism in its atheistic forms has been used to justify some of the worst civil rights violations of the last century. And one doesn’t have to go very far to see the connection between the moral decline of Western Society and the marginalization of religion.

Of course there has been a lot of ink spilt over this argument by both parties, and not everybody will agree with me. But strict materialists, with even a modicum of understanding, should be able to see the legitimacy of their religious opponents’ arguments.

There are a lot of strong opinions in this debate. And, as often happens when the stakes are this high, people take up sides – and sometimes a sword. No doubt this is inevitable. There are a lot of people who see the issues in absolute terms. And I don’t mean to imply that this is a bad thing.

As Huston Smith has written, one can think absolutely about an issue (with strong feelings) and still be tolerant of other people who think differently. In fact this is what tolerance used to mean: people with strong beliefs peacefully putting up with each other.

There has been foul play on both sides. It’s time to let it go and strive for understanding. This is more than just an academic argument, or even a political argument. This can divide us as a people in very harmful ways. Let’s all try to be a little bit smarter, and maybe our children will grow up to be wiser than we have been.

References:

DeWolf, David et al. 2006. Traipsing Into Evolution, Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision. Discovery Institute Press.

Laudan, Larry. 1996. The Demise of the Demarcation Problem; in Michael Ruse ed. But is it Science? The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy. Prometheus Books, New York.

Miller, Kenneth R. 2008. Only a Theory, Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul. Viking. The Kansas definition of science is on page 186.

The National Academies. 1999. Science and Creationism, A View from the National Academy of Sciences. National Academy Press, Washington D.C. Second Edition.

Slack, Gordy. 2007. The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Smith, Huston. 2001. Why Religion Matters. Harpers, San Francisco.

West, John G and David K. DeWolf. 2006 A Comparison of Judge Jones’ Opinion in Kitzmiller v. Dover with Plaintiffs Proposed “Findings of Fact and Conclusion of Law”. www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=1186

Building Soil in the Desert

2011-01-10T16:19:00.000-08:00

Soils in arid lands are usually not very productive. Because they are dry for long periods, many living things that normally work together to form rich soil are lacking. Very often the soils are sandy or of hard clay and only a few kinds of plants adapted to these harsh conditions can survive in them. As a result, agriculture has not been sustainable in these areas like it has in many parts of the world.

Today, however, there are apparent exceptions to this claim. Many desert regions are very productive. The Central Valley of California, for example, is one of the richest agricultural places on earth. Yet surprisingly it gets less than 12 inches of rain a year. In this dry land farmers have been producing abundant harvests for over a century. Even so, I stand by my claim: it just isn’t sustainable – at least at a local level.

In the desert, we have only been able to grow crops by bringing in billions of dollars worth of artificial inputs such as: fertilizers, pesticides, adjuvants, pheromones. I don’t mean to imply that this is a bad thing. The reality is that we would not be able to feed the world in its current condition without using the desert so proficiently. It is true that industrial agriculture is responsible for the loss of vast amounts of productive agricultural lands - especially through erosion and the sterilization of croplands. But this isn’t really an issue so much in desert regions where the rich soil wasn’t present to begin with.

In those deserts that have had the luxury of warm sandy soils, with enough water nearby, modern agriculture has made out quite nicely. In other deserts it’s been more difficult. These areas, though rich in biological diversity, have never been very agronomically productive.

My grandparents (on my father’s side) learned this the hard way. They were both raised in the cold desert of central Utah where sage brush is supreme and where the 5,000 foot elevation makes it cold enough that only one crop a year is possible. They got married at the turn of the 19th Century; and, after living for several years in Emery County, they loaded up their things and moved south to Hanksville, in Wayne County looking for a better life. This is the country east of Capitol Reef National Park and just north of Lake Powell. It is strikingly beautiful in its spare colorful formations but the soil is the soil of arid lands. It is not very productive.

My grandmother had to work very hard just to raise a small vegetable garden. Grandpa Wells would divert water from the local canal (that he helped dig from the Fremont River) to moisten the hard clay soil enough for Grandma to work with a shovel. This was a long hard process but without it, the ground couldn’t be broken and there was not nearly enough rain to grow a crop without it. Grandma and Grandpa had six children (and I don’t know how many grandchildren). Almost all of them had to live somewhere other than Hanksville. To this day the area remains mostly unfarmed.

The question that nobody seems to be asking is whether or not it is even worthwhile to develop a locally sustainable agriculture in places like Hanksville. And by locally sustainable I mean an agriculture that is continuous, year after year, without artificial inputs.

I guess that nobody has asked the question because on the surface it makes no sense whatsoever. How can anybody imagine growing a crop in hard clay or sand without adding fertilizer or other inputs from the world of agribusiness?

My answer is that pursuing agriculture as a business is not a very good idea in many of these desert lands. On the other hand, pursuing agriculture as part of a locally sustainable lifestyle is a real possibility.

The key to making it work all depends upon the soil. Historically, our American agriculture (even in the desert) has been based on using the soil. If a desert region lacked a suitable substrate for growing crops we never bothered with it. Maybe a few cows were left to find a meager sustenance on such land but that was about it. In fact that’s about where things stand today.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. It is possible to build soil, in the desert. Take the silty clay loam of Hanksville as an example. There are abundant minerals in this soil that would greatly enrich a crop, but they just aren’t available. But if a dedicated individual were to put forth the effort of creating compost - and lots of it - over time the hard clay would crumble and become part of a more frangible soil.

You would need to start with a big compost pile using the fallen leaves from local shrubs and trees. Mix these with animal manure and keep it moist, while turning it over occasionally. When this turns to soil, spread it on the garden. Seeds planted in this soft earth will grow. You may not have a lot to start with but keep at it. A drip line for watering would serve well if you have a lot of plants or a frequent hand-watering with a bucket or hose will do. Once the seedlings are on their way, add more leaves (even straw will work) and then place rocks over the leaves around the seedlings to retain moisture. If you keep things moist enough you will soon see signs of earthworms. After a few seasons the worms will work the ground from hard dirt to a rich soil that can be easily cut with a spade. Before too long you will have discovered one of the best kept secrets of these under-utilized lands: deserts can be extremely productive.

Of course local conditions will vary. You may need to bring in earthworms yourself if they don’t occur in your area. You may also have to be creative about finding enough plant material for composting. Then once your garden is thriving you may need to figure out how to keep rabbits or rodents out. But be persistent. Desert agriculture isn’t a well-established science in any form. And locally sustainable desert agriculture is a discipline that hardly even exists. It shouldn’t be this way. With the right care and determination the desert has a lot to offer.

The Gift of Leaves

2010-12-18T07:47:00.001-08:00

Autumn leaves are wonderful things. Their bright and often deep earthy colors evoke a longing for calm and a slower time of year. Even the yellows and oranges have a profundity about them that demands a solemn and joyous attention. They are beautiful and soothing symbols of change.

But they are more than this. They are also gifts of the fertile earth and part of nature's way of nourishment.

A fresh green leaf on a vernal maple tree draws nutrients from a vast storehouse of compounds and minerals that are kept in the trunk and the roots of the tree. Some of these nutrients were taken directly from last year's atmosphere. Others were absorbed by the surface roots that received the decaying products of last year’s fallen leaves. Still other nutrients have come from deeper in the soil where minerals have been slowly prized from the older rocks, gravel and sand.

Through the summer this leaf will gather the energy that comes from the sun and use it to rework the air and the soil into a packaged piece of latent life. In the autumn as it falls to the earth, it carries with it these ingredients of future growth and health.

Sadly, not many of us see these free gifts of the earth for what they are worth. Perhaps we stop at Thanksgiving time and enjoy the beauty of the changing leaves but how often are we thankful for the fallen leaves? Or, more likely, are we bothered by the extra work of raking or blowing them off the lawn?

In our eastern cities where trees grow more plentifully, homeowners often have access to a service of landscape waste removal. All that is required is to have the leaves piled in the street where the city takes care of removing them. In the drier areas of the country, leaves can be piled into dumpsters and removed with the weekly garbage. Either way, the gift of leaves is lost and the natural cycles of regeneration are lost with it. We are left with only the artificial alternatives and superficial gardens that mass marketing enables. In the end we may have green lawns and pretty flowers but never with the sustainable fertility that comes from the gift of leaves. A few plants may thrive but the natural diversity of a vital soil is lost.

Fallen leaves are only gifts if they are worked back in to the soil. Maybe there are too many of them on your lawn and they really have to go. If so, consider yourself lucky. You have an excess of the gift of leaves. Chances are your neighbors do to and just don't know it. You have a great opportunity to gather these gifts and pile them up in your backyard. If you're worried that the wind might blow them around again, sprinkle water on top and cover them with something substantial. Before you do, however, you really should let the kids roll around in them with the dog and smell their autumn richness. It will be an aromatic memory that will stay with them all their life.

Make your pile as big as you can. Gather leaves from those who don't want them. Find leaves that come from different kinds of soil. They will add variety to your pile. In a few weeks you will notice that your pile is smaller. It is already starting to decay. At this point you might want to find some barnyard manure to mix in. If you have a hard time finding some, try looking in the garden section of a hardware store. You can often buy steer manure in a bag for cheap. This manure is a magic ingredient. If you mix it in well with the leaves, or even pile it in layers, and keep it moist, the earthworms will take over with a vengeance. You may not be aware that you have earthworms. You may have even been responsible for killing a lot of them with your commercial monthly landscape routine. But this manured pile of leaves will attract worms if there are any of them around at all.

Then after a few weeks, indulge your curiosity and look under your pile. You will be amazed at the number of small creatures running around. They are all busy changing the gift of leaves into the perfect food for plants. Every few weeks you should turn your pile over. In a few months you will have created a rich humic soil that will be better for your garden than the most expensive fertilizer you can buy. This process may take a little longer if it get's cold over the winter, but don't worry, the leaves will come through. Just be patient.

And while you wait, be thankful. The fallen leaves in your yard are not meant to torment you. They are a gift. And they can make you happy.

Filling the Measure of Creation

2010-12-16T17:04:00.000-08:00

I Just learned about a black flightless beetle that lives in a canyon west of Fresno. This canyon is the only place it lives. There are no other isolated remnants or small populations anywhere else in the world. This beetle’s existence is spent rummaging through wild grasses and fallen oak leaves looking for small insects to eat, in a small corner of the world occupying only a few square miles.

As an entomologist, this sort of discovery interests me a great deal. I get excited about finding small creatures in unexpected places. In fact I have spent over three decades doing just that. And one of the things that I have come to appreciate about life on this planet is that it is local. I don’t mean that animals and plants can’t occupy large areas. Of course they can - and they do. But when we find them in their preferred habitat it is in a specific place.

Take mountain lions, for example. They occur throughout Western North America (as well as Florida) and in parts of Central and South America. They have the widest distribution of any wild cat species in the world. Even so, how many wild mountain lions have you seen in your life? Even if you get into the mountains a lot, it is more than likely that you have never seen one. In the many years and countless ventures that I have made into cougar country I have only seen one. It was at tree line in the John Muir Wilderness and the experience was awe-inspiring. I will never forget it.

A fact I wish to consider is a simple one: the species of the Creation have geographical and ecological limits. Scientists may outline detailed distribution maps and theoretical species ranges but if you ever hope to see a specific one, you need to find the right habitat.

Years ago I traveled through most of the Western United States collecting small click beetles that live on the ground between small plants and cobbles near streams and rivers. I got to the point that I could predict, with a high degree of accuracy, which places would harbor these insects and which would not. It all depended on recognizing the type of habitat and understanding the requirements of the insects. Others thought I had a sixth sense about these things but mostly it came from a lot of experience.

The Bible and the Doctrine and Covenants indicate that living things were meant to fill the measure of their creation. What does this mean exactly? Perhaps it means that living things are meant to propagate their own kind. I think it also means that living things are meant to fill a particular niche. This may seem a bit awkward - combining Genesis with ecology. But the truth is that the created order was made with intricate and sophisticated care. And so I think that filling the measure of creation means, in part, that living things enjoy the places they were created to enjoy.

But there is more - something quite significant that we usually fail to consider: we ourselves are products of particular places. This may sound like an evolutionary argument. It is not. It is an argument much older than Darwin that considers humanity and other species to be intricately woven into the very nature of the cosmos. Just as a diamond forms when certain conditions of carbon, heat, pressure and time prevail - so we are inevitable when the proper conditions prevail. The cosmos was created (or has always existed) for us.

This was the thinking of Aristotle and of the Medieval schoolmen who saw nature as a great scale of being, where form and function were all important evidence of this cosmic design. Since Darwin this understanding has been enlarged by D’arcy Wentworth Thompson (in his On Growth and Form first published in 1942) and more recently by Michael Denton (in Nature’s Destiny).

Thompson’s volume runs to over a thousand pages filled with example after example of how growth and form conform to an inevitable nature of life. “Still, all the while, like warp and woof, mechanism and teleology are interwoven together, and we must not cleave to the one nor despise the other; for their union is rooted in the very nature of totality.”

Denton’s insights stem from his research on the formation of red blood cells which he sees as epigenetic products. What he means by this is that the sum total of the genes involved are no where near sufficient, by themselves, to create red blood cells. They do create the required proteins but these proteins are essentially left on their own to continue the cascade of interconnected parts and processes that ultimately lead to a red blood cell. Denton argues that a similar situation exists for most (if not all) of the body’s processes.

“I am now quite convinced,” writes Denton, “that the discovery that protein folds are natural forms is only the beginning of what may turn out to be a major Platonic revision of biology, and an eventual relocation of biological order away from genes and mechanism and back into nature – where it resided before the Darwinian revolution.”

This perspective understands life as a physically necessary outcome of the created order. But if this is so, how do we explain the great diversity among individuals of a given species. Why, for example, do we all look so different?

Here the answer seems to be that we have built in to our genetic make-up an ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. It is a necessary part of inter-generational survival. This is how the Eskimo have become so different from the Kalahari bushmen - even though both are very human.

This is the Darwinian process of natural selection but I believe that it is much more restricted than Darwin (or his modern acolytes have) imagined. This ability to adapt is a process of joining us to a particular place. It is not a process of generating new species.

What I wish to make clear is that we are a part of the eternal order. And we are also part of the places our forefathers lived. We are both eternally intended and locally derived.

This should all be obvious but it seems that the decades of toiling against a materialistic (Darwinian) counter culture has inured many of us to the realities of place. The religious among us have been defining our natures in heavenly terms even as we discount the fallen physical world we now inhabit. This is a mistake. Who we are has much to do with where we live - both now and in the future.

Yet there is more, I think a lot more, to filling the measure of creation. In our fallen world, for example, most living things are kept from growing in to their full potential. We see this when we notice a beautiful maple tree or dogwood in full bloom in our neighbor’s yard. With proper care these impressive trees become fuller, healthier, and much more attractive than the same kinds of trees growing wild in the forest. It is really remarkable what a capable gardener can do. Yet the sad implication is that there is potential in living things that never gets realized because there is no master gardener to bring it out.

How can anything fill the measure of its creation that fails to realize its own potential? I don’t think it can. The sad reality is that in our fallen world, very few opportunities exist for any individual of any species (humans included) to live to its potential. Consider the tangled bank of a stream (to use Darwin’s famous example) containing hundreds of plants all competing with each other for space, for limited nutrients and for light. Most of the individuals in this habitat will be small and undernourished as they get pushed aside by a few dominant individuals.

Our competitive world is much the same. And just as no exceptions are made in a tangled bank for pretty flowers, tasty herbs, or healthy crops - hardly any exceptions are made for us either. Competition and a harsh world are the main things that count - and it’s the weeds that do the best.

Occasionally a seed will land in an opportune spot and develop fully. But this is an exception. For the rest of us there is really only one way to reach our potential: get planted in a garden.

Before there was “nature red in tooth and claw” there was a garden. Before our ancestors had to deal with weeds there was a garden. Before we had to deal with all the burdens of a fallen world there was a garden.

According to sacred literature plants and animals (even humans) once lived in a place of achievable potential. Not only did they live there, but this garden was prior to the world we experience here. Prior, that is, because it represents the true state of things. The Creation, after all, was made to reach the measure of its creation.

And yet here we are - living lives that find us less than we should be - living with other species living less than they can be. And the inevitable question becomes quite simply: how can we learn to garden?

A very big clue from the natural world is that a garden respects the reality of place. The stones, streams, trees, or any number of other native elements are all used. The goal is to keep things real - and remember, a garden is real. In fact our garden is more real than its fallen counterpart. It represents our true potential.

Another important part of a garden is the gardener. But not any hired hand will do. A gardener that knows the potential of his garden is rare indeed. In fact such a person does not exist in a fallen world of limited perspective - at least we can’t see Him. A hired hand may learn useful things. He may learn how to prune roses, or that blueberries prefer pine mulches, or that impatiens want just the right amount of sun. But how does he plan for the unexpected disease, for fires, or for the vagrant rabbit let in through the open gate?

Clearly, no hired hand will do. But all is not lost. We may not live in our garden yet but we can work on it even so. We can learn to love a place and learn the needs of its living things – even discovering that some places are meant for us as a land of our inheritance. This created order was meant to be diverse and sustainable. It is also a place where it is possible for us to thrive if we can learn to live as we were meant to live. And when we get proficient at this we can start to understand ourselves a little better and the true nature of our potential. Of course we may need a little help from somebody who knows more about this than we do. But the inklings are there. And who’s to say that we can’t learn to garden with His help?

References:

Denton, Michael J. 2004. An Anti-Darwinian Intellectual Journey; in, William A. Dembski ed. Uncommon Dissent, Intellectuals who find Darwinism Unconvincing. ISI Books, Wilmington, DE. Denton’s quote is on page 174.

Denton, Michael J. 1998. Nature’s Destiny, How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe. The Free Press.

Thompson, D’Arcy W. 1992. On Growth and Form. Dover Publications Inc., New York. Quotation is from page 7.

Cardo and Credo

2010-11-25T14:07:00.000-08:00

Have you ever set your heart on something so much that it changed your life? Maybe you learned for the first time that compounding interest can make you money - if you could just control your spending. Maybe you learned that home-grown vegetables taste a lot better than grocery store vegetables. Maybe you discovered that turning off the TV and talking with your family is a great thing to do.

Some ideas come into our heads and make such an impression that we are willing to do something about them. It may be that we start to save money, grow a garden, or communicate better. Or it might be something else entirely. Whatever the impression may be it involves a thought, a heart-felt desire, and a planned effort.

This is nothing new, what might come as a surprise is that the heart-felt desire is just another way of saying something that we have been misunderstanding for years - even centuries. In a religious sense this heartfelt desire is what we used to mean by the word faith.

This is easier to see if you know Latin. Take the word cardiologist, for example. Most of us recognize that this is a scientist or a doctor who works on the heart. Cardo, of course, means heart in Latin. It isn’t hard to see the similarity of this word with the Latin credo, which means faith. Our English word creed is also derived from credo. These two words, cardo and credo (heart and faith) come from the same place.

This is clearly a different understanding of faith than a mere passive belief in something. We may have a lot of ideas or rational beliefs about many things. But faith doesn’t happen until we set our hearts on one of them.

This relationship of faith and heartfelt desire is seen in the Book of Heleman (Chapter 3:34 - in the Book of Mormon):

“Nevertheless they did … [wax]… firmer and firmer in their faith of Christ, unto the filling their souls with joy and consolation, yea, even to the purifying and the sanctification of their hearts, which sanctification cometh because of their yielding their hearts unto god.”

This understanding of faith may not be one that you have heard about before - and justifiably so. You won’t find it as a definition in any standard dictionary - at least not directly. But the earlier meaning is still there and occasionally comes through in certain words and phrases.

The most obvious are the words faithful and fidelity. These words convey a sense of being true but we use them about people we love. We are faithful to our spouse because of love. We demonstrate fidelity for the same reason. Simply put, faith is a virtue of the heart - not so much a virtue of the mind. If we have faith in someone, we have heartfelt feelings for them. Similarly, a true faith in Christ is not restricted to a simple rational belief in Him. It means that we love Him.

Consider all the references in the Old Testament to God’s jealousy. They often seem a bit odd. After all, jealousy is not a virtue and admitting that a supreme being could be guilty of this human frailty just doesn’t seem right.

But jealousy exists because love exists and the commandment to love God is the same thing as the commandment to have faith in Him. Unfortunately faith has lost much of this meaning. Today most of us think that faith just means believing - and this is doubly misleading. It’s misleading because the meaning of the word belief has itself changed. It also used to refer to setting one’s heart on something. Belief just like faith was all about the heart and not so much the mind.

This is obvious in German where I love you is expressed as Ich liebe dich. Love is liebe and comes from the same place as the lieve in our believe. The relationship is even more obvious in the old English verb belove.

This is significant. It is certainly more important than a mere academic insight. It changes the way we engage in public discourse about faith.

For example, today we often hear about people lacking faith or who don’t believe in God. Some of these people are professed atheists or hesitant agnostics. Their unbelief is a rational decision. Anciently this sort of thing was unthinkable.

Before modern times, God’s existence wasn’t questioned by anybody. What might be questioned was one’s devotion to Him. The first commandment is not to believe that God exists. It is to put no other gods before Him. In the New Testament, the Apostle James (in James 2:19) admits that it isn’t all that big of a deal to just acknowledge the existence of god. After all, even the devils acknowledge Him and tremble.

One of the most significant effects that atheism has had in recent times is to move the focus of faith from devotion to rational discourse. It has not only clouded our own religious lives, it has compromised our understanding of religious history.

Take the Reformation as an example, and the way we have interpreted it today. Viewed with a cardo and credo perspective, things are not the way we often make them out to be. The Reformation’s interpretation of faith in the New Testament is particularly informative.

Paul clearly taught that we are saved by faith. But he was also keen to point out the importance of living one’s faith. That this faith is grounded in cardo is quite clear in the Gospel of John where the bulk of the references to pisteuo (meaning faith or belief) are found. In fact there are almost as many references to pisteuo in John as in the three synoptic gospels combined.

And the way John uses the word faith is important too. Very often it is used as a verb and is focused on a person. John wanted us to have faith in Jesus Christ. It’s no mere coincidence that John is also the New Testament author keenest on love and the Holy Ghost. It is essentially impossible to read John without capturing a sense that faith in Christ is no faith at all if it excludes a heartfelt determination to follow Him.

Now fast-forward several hundred years to Medieval Europe. Martin Luther insists on sola fide (on faith alone) as the way of salvation. He sees parallels between the hypocrisy of Pharisaic rules and strict Catholicism and sees an unbridgeable gulf between this formalism and simple faith in Christ. But faith in 16th Century Europe is still grounded, at least in part, in cardo. There is an element of credo too and this nuance needs to be appreciated in our histories more than it has been.

Salvation through faith alone is one thing if we mean that salvation comes to those who rationally acknowledge Jesus to have been the Son of God. It is a very different thing altogether when it means that salvation comes to those who love God with all their heart, might, mind and strength. The former can be practically anybody - including insincere speculators. The later are true heirs of salvation. For this group there is no difference between faith and the first commandment.

But now fast-forward to the 21st Century. Our understanding of faith is almost always far removed from any sense of cardo. Those who profess faith very often feel obligated to justify their lack of knowledge in the next breath - as if faith and knowledge were somehow incompatible.

Here it is worth noticing the important distinction between knowing someone (for example the Spanish conocer) and knowing something (Spanish saber). Knowing things is the hallmark of our technological world. It is a world of facts. Ironically it is also a world of constantly changing certainties and perspectives. This is not the kind of knowledge on which one places a foundational faith.

Knowing people and human motivation, however, is different, especially as it involves an understanding of human nature and the reality of good and evil. Such knowledge can be existential. This is the kind of knowledge that one can rely on if, in fact, the person relied upon is faithful - is trustworthy. This is a knowledge that is based in faith.

Suppose, for example, a new corporate executive requires one of her VP’s to close a deal in Las Vegas. She sends the man with the most experience but also realizes that the surroundings may be a problem if he gets distracted. In the end she sends him off with a faith that borders on anxious worry. This is how we understand faith today.

Now consider the woman living several blocks away – the wife of the chosen VP. She has lived with her husband for 30 years. They have experienced the ups and downs of life together. They have raised a family and enjoy nothing more than spending time together with their children and grandchildren. They are very devoted to each other and consistently strengthen their relationship with daily conversations, nightly pillow talk, and weekly dates. This woman sends her husband off to Las Vegas with a kiss and a smile and doesn’t even think to question his loyalty. She has a faith in him that is based on existential knowledge.

Not too many people have this kind of faith in God. This is a great loss. It was the way our forefathers understood faith. This was the “faith of our Fathers.” Today we live in a world where more people believe in the stock market than they do in God. People are willing to gamble on uncertainty while living in a world of trivial facts. This is the farthest thing from a world of faith - a world of cardo and credo.

In the world of long ago many people changed their lives because of Who they believed in - because of faith. It is long past due for us to set our hearts upon Him again. There is nothing more important for us to know.

Reference

Smith, Wilford Cantwell. 1979. Faith and Belief. Princeton University Press. 347 pp.

The Cost and Irony of Discouragement

2010-11-17T15:20:00.000-08:00

You have heard the aphorism that "time is money." And in a highly competitive world that places monetary values on almost everything, this makes a certain amount of sense. It obviously makes sense if you are getting paid by the hour. It also makes sense - although a bit more indirectly - if you don't. Such being our perception of the world, it behooves us to consider one of the major enemies of time management. I refer to the problem of discouragement.

Not every hour of our day is maximally productive. I am best in the morning; and since study is important to me, I like to spend part of each morning studying. I am quite a bit less productive in the evening. This can change, however, if I happen to be discouraged. On really bad days, I might get almost nothing accomplished. The cost of this unproductive discouragement can be significant. But I would like to make the argument that the cost is greater than we might imagine if our calculations are merely monetary calculations. The real cost of discouragement has little to do with money and everything to do with the lack of fulfillment in our lives.

Discouragement can come from many places. Often it comes from the behavior of others. Sometimes it comes from failing to accomplish what we have our heart set on. Sometimes it comes because of poor health. Sometimes we are justified in being disappointed. Other times we are not. Some people are chronically discouraged. Others pass into and out of discouragement. Some people are discouraged so often that they become physically ill. However it is manifest, discouragement is worth reckoning with. It is much too costly to ignore - especially considering the value of the lives that it diminishes.

Several years ago while I was working as a part time Spanish teacher to pay my way through college, I had a chance conversation with my boss. He was also a student and had been studying business management - if my memory serves me correctly. One day he made the comment to me that the major cause of disappointment was unfulfilled expectations. This surprised me for a couple of reasons. The first thing was that I hadn't initially realized this young man was so thoughtful. The second reason was that it shifted the responsibility of discouragement from others to me. Our conversation wasn't really about me - it was about some of our young students. But the simple statement has stayed with me all these years as something that is both obvious and yet often overlooked. We get discouraged because things don't go the way we want them to. This is inevitable. But in the end, we have the ability to find fulfillment.

For Buddhists, all of this is much too obvious. The central tenets of their faith revolve around the unhappiness that comes from wanting things. For them the only relief from this unhappiness is to stop desiring things altogether. I am not in a position to be overly critical of this belief, since I haven't read enough about what they mean by it. I agree with their understanding that desires do cause us grief. I do think, however, that there is a way to find happiness - even enduring happiness - without giving away our desires.

Consider a lonely mother desiring to be reconciled with her wayward son. She may be partly responsible for their estrangement and may or may not be able to make amends. Either way, her desire is not a bad thing. In fact it remains a virtue even if her unhappiness is great and her life would be better if she could just stop worrying about the boy. In fact one can make the argument that a denial of this desire would lessen the mother's humanity. It is not a natural thing for us to not have desires.

And yet it is precisely these desires - or rather the thwarting of these desires - that cause us discouragement. And this discouragement is one of the greatest drags that keep us from becoming what we otherwise have the potential to become.

One of the immediate - and very common - signs of discouragement is to give up. Young people are particularly prone to this mistake. A typical example would be a young man discovering that he has a knack for art. He then spends every one of his high school electives taking art classes. His teachers encourage him because he is their star student. Other teachers, parents and friends also praise his work. Then he enrolls in an art class at college and no longer is the favored student. Other young artists do better work than he does - or so it appears to him. After the first semester, he decides on a different major and never picks up a paintbrush again. He has succumbed to the false notion that if he can't be the best, he might as well be nothing at all.

And so what happens to this young man is that he ends up in a profession that he is only partially interested in. As he gets older he struggles with the tedium of his life and wonders why there is no passion. If he is lucky, he might open a box from the attic one day, discover his painting supplies and try again. Maybe then he can overcome the misconception of his youth.

Is there a way that the grieving mother or the young artist could have prevented - or perhaps overcome - their discouragement? I think the answer is a distinct maybe. The discouragement that comes from a denial of love can be outside of our control. If the son never does make reconciliation, his mother will always grieve. She may apologize for any wrongs she may have done and do everything else to bring him back and yet still fail. For her the best answer may only be patience and to continue in love for others.

For the young artist, his discouragement is self-imposed. He made comparative success the basis for his happiness instead of the artistic involvement with beauty. His discouragement can be overcome by recognizing his mistake and by painting again because he has a gift. In the process, he may find himself again. And in this there is a bit of irony. As he becomes truer to his own nature - overcoming the competitive (even commercial) distraction of his youth - he will inevitably become a better employee. He will in all likelihood make his employer more competitive and more money.

But this misses the point for sure. Failure hurts, just as illness does or loss of friendships does. There is no way to have desires and avoid discouragement. Buddha was right. But desire has another side as well - a human side. It is the side of joy and fulfillment that comes from becoming who we are and who we are meant to be. And the key verb here is "to become". We'll never be the perfect beings we hope to be here in mortality. We will be much less. But failing to pursue the love of others and our own individual gifts - however imperfectly we may succeed - is a sure recipe for inner conflict and even greater discouragement.

A key lesson in all of this is to accept discouragement as we struggle to find the right things to desire. Remarkably as we do this, while being true to God, our desires will become more pure. They will become more capable of an enduring fulfillment. They will also become truer to our own natures - because God rejoices in our individuality and He seeks our happiness. So wherever we may be on this mortal road of discouragement, the best advice is to accept the pain and then move on. We were meant to want things. And we were meant to have joy.

A Tree Comes Down

2010-10-31T12:53:00.000-07:00

I wonder how it came to be
That sunlight found the forest floor
On this cold place amid the stones
Where there was only shade before

While not so very far away
A thick old tree lay on the earth
Where it had fallen in the storm
That caused my own unbidden dearth

How simple are the ways that turn
The browning litter of decay
Into a golden spectacle
Reflected in the early day

No matter that the seasons had
Continued their eternal round
As if no change would ever come
Upon this shadowed frigid ground

But there it was in front of me
A seedling carpet green and bright
With flower buds just pushing through
This emptiness up into light

Marijuana is a Killer

2010-10-05T16:49:00.000-07:00

Several years ago I took a road trip as an undergraduate student to Humboldt County, California. I was with a small group looking for stoneflies in the northern part of the state. As part of our research, we stopped at several small streams running by the winding mountain roads on which we travelled. I remember one turn-off quite well. It was near a tumbling stream and I was looking at a small brown riparian beetle. Suddenly the sound of a motorcycle caught my attention and I looked up in time to see the driver weaving back and forth down the highway. He then tried to manage a curve in the road where we were parked - some 20 feet off the shoulder. Unfortunately his back wheel got away from him and slid out of control. He pulled the brakes as hard as he could but only managed to slide to a stop - after running into our Suburban. As he slid I watched in horror as his head bounced twice off of the blacktop. Fortunately he was wearing a helmet and managed to survive. But the impact knocked him out. This turned out to be for the best as the pain would have been unbearable otherwise, although at the time we didn't know if he would survive. We also noticed that his bike's kick-stand was rammed deep into his leg.

The reason I tell this story is because of the event that followed the accident. The police officer that arrived on the scene quickly evaluated the situation, called in an ambulance and then began looking for something. By the skid marks near the road he found what he expected - a small plastic bag containing marijuana. "Do you know what this is?" he asked us. Being a bit (maybe a lot) naive, we replied that we didn't. "It's Humboldt Gold," he replied. "Marijuana, and it's being grown all through these mountains. If I were you gentleman, I wouldn't stray too far from the road. You don't want to stumble on to anybody's garden, if you know what I mean." We took his advice.

Right now the issue of legalizing marijuana is on the November ballot (Proposition 19) in California. Advocates for and against the legislation are currently making their best (often heated) arguments one way or the other. I don't claim to be an expert on many of these arguments but I am disappointed by the misrepresentation surrounding the effect of marijuana on drivers. Proponents for legalizing the drug claim that it is no more dangerous than other over-the-counter medications and that users are fully capable of driving under the influence. This is a very poor argument.

It may be true that someone experiencing a marijuana buzz may be able to safely navigate to the grocery store and back home again. This isn't the sort of situation that kills people. It's the sudden need to react that causes the accidents: braking for the stray cat, hydroplaning after a fall rainstorm, swerving from a reckless driver. Users of marijuana are much less likely to manage these sudden emergencies well.

But this isn't the only concern. Arguing that marijuana is not more dangerous than grocery-store medication fails to take into account one very important fact: there is no quality control for marijuana or marijuana products. Drug companies are legally required to make sure every pill they sell meets accepted medical standards. No such laws exist for marijuana nor are they likely to be imminently forthcoming. Plants don't make even quantities of biologically active compounds. There are too many unpredictable variables for this to be possible. One supplier of marijuana is certainly going to have more active material than her competitor in a neighboring county. You may think you know how much you can handle but when you least expect it, you'll find yourself in more trouble than you bargained for - experiencing an overdose at a critical moment.

It simply isn't worth gambling like this with people's lives - and this is certainly an issue that will involve people's lives. How blind are we that we can't see this? How much "fun" do we think we need when the cost of the diversion is calculated in individual lives? Maybe you think that you can handle it. But do you really think that everybody else can? Marijuana is plant-derived, variably active and a mind-altering drug. It may be (or may not be) safe in an isolated campground far away from town, but in the fast-paced urban world most of us live in, it's a killer.

Stone Mulching in the Desert

2010-09-29T16:25:00.000-07:00

Some years ago in rural Michigan a forested area was cleared and all the trees except three young hemlocks were cut down. These small trees were left to manage for themselves. In the forest where they had been protected from wind and excessive heat, they also had to compete with other trees for basic nutrients. Yet they had managed to do alright.

Left on their own, however, in a bulldozed area, two of the three trees died within a year. The third tree ended up flourishing and became a beautifully shaped and canopied tree - quite different from typical forested hemlocks.

The only difference between the trees was that the surviving tree, quite by chance, happened to have a load of loose rocks dumped right next to it soon after the land was cleared. In the months following, the rocks kept vital moisture from evaporating near the tree and many worms and insects were able to enjoy the clement conditions they provided. These small creatures worked the ground into a nourishing environment for the roots. This couldn’t have happened where the ground was dry.

This is just one example (and there re many) of the value of mulching with stones. Unfortunately these discarded resources are usually considered only in the context of how to get rid of them. This is too bad. Stone mulches offer a lot of benefits. But they are particularly helpful in dry areas.

You have probably learned by experience that the soil under rocks can be moist when everything else is dry. Some people use this fact to calculate watering times for their garden. When it’s dry underneath, it’s time to water. And, in fact, the most important benefit of having stones around plants is that it keeps water from evaporating too quickly.

This can make a very big difference to a plant. In many dry areas, water usually evaporates quicker than roots can grow. Since soil dries out from the top first, plants have an incentive to grow roots as deep and as fast as possible, keeping their feet wet, so to speak. Once the soil is dry around the roots, a plant has very little time left to produce seeds before it dries out. Its entire life cycle is dependent on a few weeks of moisture every year. (This is why many desert plants have thick leaves and roots. It allows them to store more water when the rains do come, and it buys them more time to develop seed and fruits when it becomes dry again.)

But what happens if a non-succulent plant happens to be growing next to a stone in the desert? Initially the amount of rainwater may be the same as before. But because the stone slows down evaporation, it allows the plant’s roots to grow for a longer period – essentially keeping up with the rate of evaporation. Plants with deeper and better developed roots are bigger, healthier, and set more fruit. It’s no surprise that plants growing next to rocks often look so good.

Of course there are other benefits to stone mulches than just water retention. Roots often grow next to stones because it’s a place to leverage growth. It’s also a place where rainwater (or sprinkler water) seeps into the soil first. The small space left from this seepage also allows worms and insects to move easier, creating a vital microclimate for roots.

Of course the use of stone mulches is not the only way to build soil. Other mulches do too. But stone mulches have a bit more value in dry areas than other mulches do. Take, for example the experience of Dorothy Anderson.

Dorothy lived in Wisconsin a couple of generations ago. Now Wisconsin is not the driest place in the world but the summer heat can often dry things out. Dorothy was also an avid gardener and paid attention to how her neighbors did things. When she learned that mulching (with hay, weeds, etc.) was bringing bountiful harvests to others, she was determined to do the same thing herself. But then she ran in to some difficulty.

She didn’t have a lot of leftover plant material to use as mulch and when she put what little she could find in her garden, it just dried up and covered the dry ground. She didn’t get much benefit from it. It took several years and a lot of foraging to get enough weeds and other organic matter to really help her garden.

For those of us living in the dry Southwest, we certainly understand this kind of problem. In fact the problem is a lot worse for us. Not only is it hotter and drier but there’s less plant waste to go around. If we really want to mulch, we often go to the hardware store and just buy it. And if we don’t put out enough, it doesn’t do us any more good than the little Dorothy started with.

The situation changes, though, if we use stones. Place a handful or two of grass (or straw) mulch on the ground here in Fresno and it will quickly dry up and get blown away. But if you put the same handful on the ground and place a stone on top of it, things change. The most obvious thing is that the mulch stays there. It’s also shaded and small insects will crawl under the stone to get out of the sun. If moisture is added it will stay near the soil surface much longer than in surrounding areas.

A study conducted in the 70’s in the desert Southwest showed that moisture evaporates from bare soil at a fairly even rate of about an inch every three days. Under the same conditions, moisture evaporated from a stony area at a rate of about an inch every two weeks. This added moisture is as good as gold to plants in dry areas. It also creates an environment for soil-building organisms such as earthworms, arthropods and even fungi. A flat stone in the desert is a way to build soil if we know how to use it.

One of the interesting histories of the Southwest is the agricultural use of stone mulches by the Anasazi. Dale Lightfoot at Oklahoma State University has evaluated these mulches extensively in dozens of abandoned farming areas near Santa Fe, New Mexico where these mulched areas can still be identified - over 700 years after they were made. The areas show up clearly using aerial infra-red photography because they are greener than surrounding areas. These erstwhile garden sites are noted for their regular arrangements of cobbled stones with borrow pits from which the stones were taken.

Lightfoot concludes that these stone mulches not only increased (and still increase) soil moisture but that they also reduce erosion, extend the growing season and increase crop yields. This is quite a list for a dry country not known for its lush gardens.

The biggest drawback of these stone gardens is that they are not sustainable. Whatever nutrients can be found in the soil are used up by successive crops so that new areas have to be prepared every several years. In China, where stone mulching has been used (as recently as a century ago) this problem was understood to affect the children and grandchildren of farmers who would have to extend significant resources removing stones in order to work nutrients back into the soil.

This problem has not been overcome. It is one of the main reasons that stone mulching is not practiced commercially on large farms. It just isn’t practical to remove several tons of rocks from a field and then to turn around and replace them after working the soil.

But that said, stone mulches still have their place. In fact they should be more widely used in dry areas. We know a few more things about nutrient cycling today than did the Anasazi or Chinese of former times. We know, for example, that stone mulches can be sustainable if organic material (such as cut grasses, straw, fallen leaves, etc.) is placed under stones each year.

Modern gardeners who do this use larger stones than the Anasazi did - since it’s easier to move them. Flat stones are also preferred to round cobbles. Various kinds of composts are placed in a garden spot with rows of flat stones (roughly the size of salad plates) covering the compost. Plants are then allowed to grow between the rows of stones.

For trees, a thick layer of compost with stones placed around the trunk does the same thing. It only takes a little effort to remove the stones once or twice a year and add more compost, and then replace the stones. The total effort is less than that required for weeding - which, of course, is no longer required. And the results have been impressive. Difficult soils are improved with the arrival of worms and insects, moisture is retained; and, most importantly, plants are much happier (if we can use that word) and more productive.

Stone mulching may not be a realistic possibility for farmers whose livelihood depends on their harvest (although creative orchardists could likely make it work). But on a smaller scale, and for those of us who care about sustainability, it makes a lot of sense - especially out here in the desert.

References

Lightfoot, D.R. 1994. The Agricultural Utility of Lithic-Mulch Gardens: Past and Present. GeoJournal 34(4): 425-437.

Lightfoot, D.R. and F.W. Eddy. 1995. The Construction and Configuration of Anasazi Pebble-Mulch Gardens in the Northern Rio Grande. American Antiquity 60(3): 459-470.

Rodale, J.I. 1949. Stone Mulching in the Garden. Rodale Press, Emmaus, PA.

Rodale, R. et al. 1972. The Organic Way to Mulching. Rodale Press, Emmaus, PA.

Library Insurance

2010-09-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

It is a sad time for libraries. Once the pride of our communities (from small towns to large universities) they now struggle to keep patrons. And in order to keep up with the times, they are becoming a lot of things in order to justify their very existence - a lot of things, that is, except libraries in the real sense of that word. Books are being replaced by services and with the loss of these books, we run the risk of losing much of what we have worked so hard to learn.

A library is (and has always been) a place to keep literary and artistic materials. Traditionally, libraries have been comprised of current literature and stacks of older literature. (Many libraries also keep special collections of historic value.) Both were important. They also provided an atmosphere of learning. Libraries that were associated with colleges and universities provided an atmosphere where students could study quietly amid the volumes that they needed as reference materials. They also had access to the latest findings from their chosen fields with resources available to find information on practically any subject.

Today our libraries are mostly empty and students are finding all they think they need via computer. I have no intention of being critical of computers. To the extent that they improve our lives I welcome them. I must insist, however, that the move from the world of the library to the world of the computer is a risky thing. It is a move that threatens to destroy a great deal.

In the world of scholarship, for example, fewer and fewer volumes are being printed of many (perhaps most) important periodicals. Scholars are preferring to access articles on line from their office rather than walk over to the library. This is a convenience (I admit - and indulge in it myself). I certainly see no harm in this especially as it reduces the amount of environmental inputs and required shelf space needed to store books.

Many institutions have been wise enough to keep hard copies of these volumes on hand in case digital resources become temporarily unavailable. Of course it is impossible for any single institution to keep hard copies of everything that gets printed. So as a way around this, academic communities began a number of years ago sharing their holdings through a process of inter-library loan. This has been a real boon to scholars who have gained easier access to more materials. With an ever increasing amount of information getting printed, this service has become indispensible to serious research.

It's worth considering for a moment what shelf space in libraries meant many years ago and how it was managed. I have many fond memories of walking through the stacks of books as a graduate student at BYU in the 1980's and being amazed at the number of books. When I later transferred to The Ohio State University and discovered that its library was several times larger than BYU's I was even more amazed. The stacks of books made up several floors in the main library and space was being made to add more shelves in the mezzanine. Many subject libraries were already being moved to satellite locations to make room for the ever increasing number of volumes.

Some time later when I began studies at Colorado State University, I noticed that space was being handled in a different way. Many of the volumes had been moved to a storage facility - basically an over-sized warehouse. Requests had to be made for these volumes and there was a lapse of a day or two before a runner could find them and make them available. It was fortunate that many of these volumes had been moved because the Cache le Poudre River flooded in the mid-1990's and many of the volumes on the first floor of the library were destroyed.

Meanwhile, many volumes of older literature are now being digitally copied and made available on-line. Cornell University, for example, has made available hundreds of volumes of older agricultural literature that is hard to find elsewhere. This again is a great resource. Every year, more and more volumes become available in all branches of learning. And as a bonus we now have hand-held digital devices that make reading this material much easier and more enjoyable than older technology allowed. It is a great time to be doing research now that many older texts are becoming more readily available at our fingertips.

So doesn't all of this contradict my point? Not in the least. With all the technology (great as it is) our literature is increasingly at risk. Notice the trend. Fewer and fewer hard copies are being printed as more and more people are staying away from libraries (because more and more resources are available on-line). Libraries compensate by reducing shelf space in order to draw in more patrons with services (even coffee shops). It doesn't take much to imagine a scenario of computer collapses where vast amounts of information are irretrievably lost. This sort of collapse doesn't have to be a global melt-down. It could be local, or a series of local disasters.

Let me offer an example. I have in my library several volumes of taxonomic revisions that are very difficult to find. I require them for my research on insect diversity. I have worked at building this collection over 30 years. Much of this work was published when insect taxonomy was of greater interest to the academy than it is today and many more volumes were printed. Now when I say that many volumes were printed, I don't mean to compare this literature to the number of volumes that works of popular fiction generate. But many of these earlier taxonomic works had printing runs of several thousand copies. Even so, they are hard to find today.

If that is true of older literature, what is the situation like today? Important taxonomic research is still being conducted but it is often printed in journals with fewer and fewer hard copies produced. Authors buy fewer and fewer reprints because their work can be accessed on-line. It is very likely that hard copies are missing of these works from entire regions of the US. As a result, hard copies of current taxonomic research will be many times harder to come by in future than the older literature is today. Digital versions of this work are usually located on one server (hopefully backed up). If it gets lost... I think you get the point.

What then can be done? Clearly we should not be limiting computer resources. They are truly valuable - even if, indirectly, they justify the demise of traditional libraries and the loss of books. One thing, however, should be done: you should continue to keep hard copies in your own library.

I’m not suggesting that you accumulate a wall of books of best-selling authors. They will survive the short term disaster without difficulty. And their long-term survival will depend on their usefulness to later generations. I am suggesting that you save less popular works - titles and authors that because of their limited popularity are usually missing from libraries.

My collection of Gerald Durrell books, for example, or my volumes about science and religion. It is rare that I find any of these titles in local libraries. I don’t generally flatter myself about my collection. Mostly it takes up a lot of space – space that my wife would love to have. But it is a bit of security. I’ve been buying books for a few decades and only rarely pick a title because of its monetary value. I buy books that interest me. Even so, many of these volumes are now hard to find. What will they be worth in 50 years or more?

So again I urge you to buy real books. Think of it as insurance for the authors you love – for the books that you love. It may be that you end up saving one for future generations. Stranger things have happened.

Living Beyond Judgment

2010-08-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

From the time we are little until the time we die, it seems we are being continually judged. Maybe more of this judgment is imagined than real but certainly not all of it is. We are judged by the clothes we wear, the car we drive, the company we keep. We are judged by our language, our jobs, even our dogs. Each exam we take in school is a kind of judgment, as are hiring decisions, try-outs, and performance evaluations. We are judged a lot and we are used to it - whether we like it or not.

But perhaps the most relentless and misplaced judgments of all are the incorrect kinds we make on ourselves. I say incorrect kinds because some self-judgments are necessary, even critical. A careful self-evaluation can be a prelude to repentance and an important grounding to our lives.

The incorrect kinds of self-judgments, however, are a different sort. They come from using the wrong kind of standards. Unfortunately we tend to spend so much more time on the wrong kinds of judgment than we do on the right kinds. Wise, indeed, is the person that knows when to judge and when not to - or as Jesus said, to “judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24).

The wrong kinds of self-judgments are invariably comparative. You pitted against others or even against yourself. The right kinds of self-judgments measure light instead. Do you like making others happy? Do you rejoice in learning spiritual truths? How positive are you? Do you make sacrifices for principles? How much can you be trusted? How much are you loved? How much do you love? These kinds of questions measure light. They are very different from the kinds of comparisons we’re more familiar with. It is light and truth, in the end, that really matter, not how you look or where you live.

Consider three employees at a local restaurant. Angela I works in the kitchen washing dishes. She is mostly interested in having fun. She likes to talk and tell jokes and tends to take longer at breaks than her employer allows. In her spare time she plays a lot of video games or talks to her friends. She often judges herself harshly for not being more responsible.

Angela II is a waitress and is mostly interested in making money. She is pleasant to her customers and knows how to turn on the charm if she thinks it might yield a bigger tip. She is quite capable and usually responsible. In her spare time she likes to go to the gym or talk to friends. She also judges herself harshly at times for not having moved ahead enough in her career.

Angela III is a cook. She likes making good food, especially if it makes somebody happy. She enjoys visiting customers just to interact with them and make them smile. She is happiest when she makes others happy. In her spare time she enjoys reading or talking to friends. She doesn’t judge herself very often because she is more interested in pursuing those things that bring her joy.

I don’t mean to imply that Angela I and Angela II are bad (or that the things they do are necessarily bad). But I do mean to point out the nature of a person seeking light: Angela III, that is. She may or may not move ahead in the restaurant, but that doesn’t matter. She may fall in or out of health, depending on her genetic heritage and her lifestyle. She may or may not be wealthy depending on her fiscal choices. But one thing is obvious: whatever her circumstances, she will be seeking light.

Another remarkable thing about Angela III is that she is living beyond judgment. I don’t mean that others won’t judge her. They will. Neither do I mean that she always avoids her own self judgment. I do mean that in the things that matter most - in the eternally important things - Angela III is an heir of glory and can never be condemned.

In Doctrine and Covenants Section One (verse 36) the Lord discusses judgments that are to come upon the wicked. But notice the way it is phrased. “And also the Lord shall have power over his saints, and shall reign in their midst, and shall come down in judgment upon Idumea, or the world.” Those, Like Angela III who are full of the light of Christ are beyond this judgment of the world.

I don’t mean to imply that Angela III (or any of us) will not be responsible for her (our) actions. The scriptures are clear that we will be recompensed for our actions. But what exactly is to be the measure of these actions? Again, Section One spells this out (verse 10): ... “the Lord shall come to recompense unto every man according to his work, and measure to every man according to the measure which he has measured to his fellow man.”

Our actions will be measured by the standard of service to others. This is a measure of light, not a mensurable quota. It is also different than the way some Christian denominations understand judgment - especially the final judgment - to be. To them the final judgment cannot be escaped and it is understood to be a forensic event - complete with courtroom, jury and judge. For the faithful the only consolation is that it will be less harsh.

This perspective, however, fails to take in to account many of the key scriptural verses on judgment. The Apostle John in particular was keen on this and spoke often about judgment, or living beyond it. He presents us with the apparent contradiction of living beyond judgment while affirming that Jesus will also be our judge. One has to pay attention to see what he actually means by this.

Most of us are familiar with the Biblical doctrine of the final judgment. It will be the ultimate accounting of who we are and where we will go in the life to come. There are a number of scriptural references that confirm this.

It comes as a bit of a surprise when we read in the third chapter of the Gospel of John (verse 17) that Jesus did not come to earth to judge us at all. Many New Testament versions of this verse use the word condemn, but in the original Greek the word is clearly krinetai - to judge. “For God sent not his son into the world to judge the world, but that the world through him might be saved.”

Of course you might point out that John surely can’t mean this since he is the one who clearly taught that Jesus is to be our judge. “For the Father hath committed all judgment to the son …. (John 5: 22). But this isn’t all that John meant. A closer reading suggests that judgment is only to separate those who will rise “unto the resurrection of life” from those who will rise “unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:29). For Christ came to bring everlasting life and not to bring others” into judgment” (John 5:24). Again the word is krinetai – judgment. Judgment is to separate light from darkness.

“[Jesus] said ... I am come a light into the world that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness. And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world” (John 12: 44-47).

So of course Jesus is our judge in the sense the He is the author of our redemption from sin. But ultimately we will be our own judges as John points out in the following verse: “He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the words that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day” (John 12: 48).

In a more detailed discussion of how this is to happen, Alma taught that our words and our works will condemn us: “For our words will condemn us, yea, all our works will condemn us; we shall not be found spotless; and our thoughts will also condemn us; and in this awful state we shall not dare to look up to our God; and we would fain be glad if we could command the rocks and the mountains to fall upon us to hide us from his presence” (Alma 12:14).

This relationship with judgment and condemnation appears frequently throughout the scriptures and the message is consistent: judgment is to separate those that will be condemned from those that will inherit more glory - that is from those that will inherit a kingdom of light, whether that be a light similar to the stars (perhaps the brighter stars), the moon, or even the sun (see I Corinthians 15:40-42).

This is consistent with John’s message that Jesus came to save us and not to judge us. This becomes particularly significant in light of Doctrine and Covenants Section 76 where it is indicated that these degrees of glory (telestial, terrestrial, and celestial) will be filled with the vast majority of the human family.

What a sublime truth this is: that Jesus has no interest in judging any of us. He rejoices in our individuality and, by giving us our agency, has allowed each of us to fully develop into the unique person that is our nature. We will not be clones in heaven.

The question we need to be concerned with has little to do with appearing to do the right things. It does, however, have everything to do with being the right kind of person. The popular image of Peter standing at the pearly gates to great us with a checklist in hand is a crude myth at best. Peter may not even be there, but Christ will - for He employs to servant there. And He most certainly will not be holding a checklist. He will be welcoming us, with open arms, to our place of glory - our place of light.

Preparing for Dred Scott

2010-08-05T14:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Walker decision against California's Proposition Eight has left many of us in California (supporters of traditional marriage that is) quite frustrated. The 2008 decision (determined from a state-wide election) to confirm the traditional meaning of marriage between a man and a woman has now been over-ruled. Judge Vaughn Walker's decision is based on his claim that denying marriage to gay and lesbian couples violates the 14th Amendment's equal protection and due process clauses. There is no question that this provincial decision by a biased judge will make its way to the Supreme Court. When it does, let's hope that sounder judgment prevails. It is no exaggeration to state that an unwise decision from our highest court may very well makes things worse than the Dred Scott decision did before the Civil War. Let me explain.

I am certainly no legal scholar, but the history of Dred Scott is not so difficult to understand. He was a slave that travelled quite a bit with his master through both free and slave states and free territories. While in free territories, he was recognized as a free man. After his master's death he sought to purchase his freedom with various degrees of success. Some court rulings granted his arguments, others did not. Finally his case came to the Supreme Court where Justice Taney ruled that Negroes were not citizen's of the United States and then reversed the Missouri Compromise (and its exclusion of slavery from northern Louisiana). It has been one of the worst decisions (if not the worst) in American legal history. By reversing the Missouri Compromise, Taney effectively gave expanding powers to the slave states against the northern states. Of course we know the outcome. It took the Civil War to reverse the decision.

Isn't it a bit fantastic, though, to believe that a mere decision about gay rights could be as significant as Dred Scott? Not really. Consider the following scenario:

Judge Walker's decision is upheld by the Supreme Court. Some weeks later a gay couple in a conservative state - say New Hampshire - decides to show up at the State Capitol and get their marriage license. Much to their surprise, the state refuses to grant them one. They might complain that their legal rights have been ignored but the bare reality of an overwhelming conservative majority of irate New Hampshire citizens might very well make it politically unwise for the state officials to acknowledge the Supreme Court's decision.

Then what happens? Uncle Sam might start withholding federal programs. New Hampshire might lose it's representation in Congress. Other forms of pressure would undoubtedly be found and exercised. Soon other states would decide to back New Hampshire and before we know it, there is a national crisis in the making.

Now you might argue that this sort of thing could never happen. Look at the Court's decision, for example, in Roe v. Wade where abortion was legalized. Certainly abortion is as divisive an issue as gay rights and yet nothing so drastic happened in its wake. But here is the main difference: Roe v. Wade was a decision that ultimately became enforceable at the level of an individual woman and her doctor. Even in conservative states, doctors were available to perform abortions when they were requested.

The issue over redefining marriage, on the other hand, will have to be handled at the state level. That's where marriage licenses are issued. It's also a place where tremendous amounts of political pressure can be applied either way. I think it is highly naive to imagine that an issue this divisive would fail to elicit extreme reactions from millions of Americans if this sort of scenario were to be played out.

This is a very serious issue indeed. Let us pray that the Supreme Court is wise enough to understand this. For the rest of us, it might not be a bad idea to rethink how dependant we should be on Washington.

What is a Classic?

2010-07-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s a very good chance that your classical reading is not what you think it is. What I mean is that many of the presumed classics you may have read are really not classics at all.

You might question my right to make such a claim. After all, my training is in the sciences and there is a lot of good literature that I still haven’t read. Even so, I stand behind my claim. The more I stumble through our so-called modern classics and best-sellers the more I realize their fiction: they just aren’t classics.

What my children are reading in their high school and college English classes are award-winning novels. It is a gross misjudgment to call them classics. I don’t mean they are poorly written; they aren’t. Nor do I mean that their stories aren’t interesting or even important; many of them are. I do mean that they usually lack the key ingredient of a classic: a timeless and significant accounting of the great questions.

Now many of our award-winning novels are thought-provoking stories. Many of them also touch on great themes. But the great questions - sometimes called the Terrible Questions - are almost always absent. These are the questions inextricably associated with religion: Why are we here? What does death mean? How is it possible to find meaning in life?

Not all religions answer these questions alike. In a society that allows for differing religious beliefs, it is inevitable that these questions will be answered differently. But the fact remains that the sacred texts of these religious traditions, insofar as they grapple with the great questions, are classics.

Of course, you might not like your children reading my religious books at school. And I might not like my children reading your religious books either. Or maybe were both a bit more enlightened and are OK with this sort of cultural exchange. Either way we both have to acknowledge that some people would be offended by it. In a free society, it makes sense to keep controversial religious opinions out of public schools.

This doesn’t mean, though, that we should keep the great questions out of public schools. In fact one has to wonder how we can claim to be providing any kind of a quality education without them.

In the past we managed nicely with an accepted bundle of classics from Ancient Greece, Rome and pre-modern Europe (sacred Eastern texts were also included at times). And while these texts were mostly products of Western Civilization, they were suitable for a religiously diverse culture to discuss in a public forum.

Yet very often we look in vain to find them. What has happened to them? I think the answer is a combination of things. An important obvious reason is that there isn’t much money any more for the humanities. Another reason is that the remaining classical courses are only electives anymore. Yet another reason is that we’ve started teaching from award-winning novels instead of from the classics.

Now I don’t mean to be disrespectful of Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, or Harper Lee. In fact I like some of their writing a lot. I’m even happy that my children read them (for the most part). But I’m not at all happy that their books are taking the place of the classics. [I group Mark Twain with the award-winning novelists because I think he would have received an award if they would have been available in his day.]

It’s instructive to consider for a moment how literary awards are given. The important ones are chosen from a panel of representatives from prestigious publishers (of books, newspapers and magazines). One is hard pressed to find religious representatives - or from anybody who is particularly interested in the great questions.

This is really very understandable. Publishing houses along with other media sources (what Richard Weaver called the Great Stereopticon) are the great competitors of religion for the minds of citizens in a free society. I’m not suggesting that this competition is necessarily a bad thing. Yet while it may be true that actively religious people get exposure to the great questions through their participation at church, more people never take the chance to do so.

Instead, we force everyone to read whatever award-winning novel their particular English teacher happens to be familiar with. The great questions about what it means to be human are never considered. And we delude ourselves into thinking that our modern world is all that matters and that the solution to any problem, can be solved by popular vote.

Sadly, we now live in a society reaping the rewards of this myopia. Instead of wise leaders with a moral backing in what really matters, we have figureheads making decisions based on opinion polls. Nobody wants to talk about the important questions in public because we’ve thrown their associated texts out of our schools.

The result of all this is a society that has lost its moral grounding. We’ve pulled anchor and don’t know where we’ve drifted. Even worse, we don’t know where we’re going. Many of us are enjoying the scenery at least for the moment. But there’s a word associated with waking up from a dream and not knowing where you are. It’s called fear. And fear can only be the heritage of drifting souls.

One thing, however, is certain. We’ll never learn how to change this without a good deal of thinking about the great questions. It’s certainly time we stop confusing false classics for the real thing.

References

Weaver, R.M. 1948. Ideas Have Consequences. University of Chicago Press.

Human Nature and Original Sin

2010-07-24T18:50:00.000-07:00

Are we by nature good or are we bad? Do we have the capacity for rising above our limitations or are we forever doomed by the biological constraints of our physical bodies? These are the questions thoughtful people ask in every generation and the answers turn out to be fairly consistent: we are both good and bad.

Take Solzhenitsyn, for example, who came to the conclusion while laying in rotting prison straw wishing that evil people could be somehow separated from good people. It isn’t hard to sympathize with him and lament the injustices he endured while in the gulags. But he realized that it wasn’t possible to separate people this way because “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

The Psalmist marveled that God had created man just lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor (Psalms 8:5). And yet the wickedness of man has been great and every imagination of his heart evil (Genesis 6:5).

There is nothing very surprising about this. A little honest introspection should be enough to convince each of us of our own dual natures. And yet for all this apparent clarity, we rarely manage to put into practice this truth that seems so obvious. We insist on shaping our societies as if we were just one or the other, as if we could do no good, or as if we could do no evil.

In American history, the Puritans stand out as clear examples of the former. Man inherited their evil natures from Adam and could not be trusted, or so they believed. In Hawthorne’s classic novel, The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne was required to wear a prominent letter A throughout her life as a sign of her degenerate - and seemingly incorrigible - nature.

Yet the very same New England that cultivated this 17th Century bigotry, turned completely around and by the mid 19th Century produced the Transcendentalists who believed that man could do no harm. Emerson’s belief in the greatness of man and in his immense potential has convinced (and still convinces) generations of Americans to trust no one more than their individual native geniuses.

Fortunately, the American founders were wiser in this regard than we have been. They established a government with the expectation that evil and designing men would seek public office. Checks and balances were accordingly put in place and with good effect. Today the United States government is the longest-lived constitutional government in the world. Ironically, it is because of this legal restraint that America has become a land of freedom, a land brimming with self confidence, and a land of realized human potential.

But things are not the same as they used to be. Almost all legislation these days ignores this dual nature of man. Committees are formed and budgets are allocated, but who checks-up on the committees or reviews the success of expensive programs? We write laws that are politically expedient (and self-promoting) while hardly worrying about their abuse once they are passed. Large budgets are created without the care needed to avoid the greed of special interests. Corruption abounds.

Of course we have political parties that carefully watch their corrupt competitors (and eagerly advertise what they find). But concern is much greater over deflecting criticism than it is over partisan character. In truth there is a greater moral divide separating individuals in the same political party than there is between the very issues separating these parties.

It becomes worthwhile asking ourselves how all of this came about. How did we start worrying about partisan causes more than about personal character? No doubt there are many reasons. One important reason that deserves special consideration is the unpopular and timeworn concept of original sin.

Original Sin

No one likes to think about their own faults. In fact only a few strong individuals ever attempt to look at their own failings objectively (as a prelude to personal improvement). Being told that we are sinful is almost certain to elicit a negative reaction on our part. Being told that we are sinful just by the fact of being born isn’t likely to be any more popular. Even so, this is one of the messages of original sin that has been accepted by many Christians as doctrine for centuries. Maybe our ancestors didn’t like it, but its truthfulness seemed self-evident. It was a doctrine that informed who they were and what they thought about themselves.

It was a doctrine that required rulers to accept - even plan for - corruption in their subjects. But it worked both ways. For example, when the barons of 12th Century England began exercising their own political rights, it became obvious to them that even rulers were likely to err and needed to be watched. One of the founding documents of Western freedom - Magna Carta - was forged from this realization.

Yet ironically it was the breaking away from the idea of original sin that empowered the Enlightenment, and ushered in the modern world with its confidence in man and its accompanying idea of progress. Clearly there seems to be an historical give and take here between fallen and enlightened man. For those who were taken in by the addictive fiction of an unpolluted human nature, the French Revolution came as a shock. Rousseau’s doctrine of the noble savage soon matured in to the massacres of thousands.

America, by contrast, experienced her own political upheaval at the same time but with very different results. More popularly called a rebellion than a revolution, her government retained traditional institutions, including a belief in a fallen world and of a fallible human nature.

History seems to be telling us something important here if we only had the wisdom to pay attention. It seems to be our inclination to believe in just one or the other of our dual natures, but not both, at any given time. Either we fail to be suspicious of our rulers and end up in bondage, or we fail to see our potential and live enfeebled lives. Today we are obviously making the first mistake, and in so doing are scoffing (or more likely ignoring) the whole idea of original sin.

Given our historical misunderstanding it would serve us well to consider the doctrine in a little more detail: where it came from and what it has come to mean.

The Doctrine of Original Sin

Both Judaism and Christianity agree (as do other religious traditions) that life on earth, as we commonly experience it, is a fallen or a corrupted place. Both traditions also agree that we experienced a better place prior to mortality from which Adam and Eve (our original ancestors) were driven because of sin. There is, however, a big difference between being a descendant of someone who has transgressed and actually carrying part of the burden for that sin oneself. It is something yet again to be guilty of that sin. These distinctions may seem subtle but they have been at the heart of many religious controversies through the years.

Nowhere in the Old Testament is there any suggestion that mankind is guilty of Adam’s transgression. There are places where the challenges of mortality are admitted and traced back to Adam, but these challenges, by themselves, do not constitute sin.

The New Testament is much the same with one primary exception. Paul’s epistle to the Romans (Chapter 5:12-21) recognizes Adam’s sin and then becomes a bit ambiguous (Tennant indicates that this is one of the most difficult passages in the Bible to understand theologically) about human sin. These verses were eventually understood to mean that mankind sinned with Adam’s sin, although originally this was not the case.

The early church fathers have nothing to say about original sin until Origen, who in emphasizing our inherited mortal condition failed to make a clear enough distinction between corruption and sin. To make matters worse, Origen also lived in northern Africa where there had developed the practice of infant baptism. Historians have not been able to show the reasons for this early practice but by the time of Origen, it was widely accepted. It became almost inevitable that the practice assumed a role of mitigating the corruption of the fall, once it was believed that corruption might involve sin.

Sometime later, Tertullian added another piece to the developing doctrine. While rejecting infant baptism, he taught that the spirit offspring of Adam inherited the sin of their ancestor at conception. This complex doctrine (known as traducionism) never became established church doctrine but the belief in an inherited sin did, along with infant baptism and Origen’s corrupted humanity. By the time of Augustine and the important Pelagian controversies, these basic points were fairly well established doctrines.

During the Reformation these doctrines were openly challenged. Some reformers argued that baptism should be done by immersion and not by sprinkling. Others argued that children did not need baptism because they didn’t carry the sin of Adam. An interesting perspective on this that sounds like a wise compromise from the time of Origen is Zwingli’s (16th Century) argument that we are all born with the inborn rapacity of the wolf. This inborn drive often prompts us to tear the sheep. But there is also an implication that we can chose not to act upon these prompting as well.

Latter-day Saint Beliefs

Latter-day Saint beliefs on original sin reject the notion that children can be sinful (either by inheritance or otherwise) before they reach an age of accountability (recognized to be eight years old). Mormon (in the Book of Mormon) writing to his son Moroni taught that, “little children are whole, for they are not capable of committing sin; wherefor the curse of Adam is taken from them in me…” (Moroni 8:8).

And yet human beings are clearly prone to mortal corruption. Nephi (also in the Book of Mormon) lamented, “how foolish, and how vain, and how evil, and devilish, and how quick to do iniquity, and how slow to do good, are the children of men…(Heleman 12:4).

Latter-day Saints do, however, accept an intergenerational responsibility towards sin that is often over-looked. Parents who sin are held responsible for the disadvantages they pass on to their children through generations. In Section 98 of the Doctrine and Covenants, however, it indicates that repentant children can repent and remove this guilt from their parents. This does not mean that children inherit sin, nor does it mean that we are not responsible for our own sins. It does, however, imply that we can inherit disadvantages from our parents. In this sense, Latter-day Saints do believe that we have inherited a fallen world from our first parents, but our agency has not been breached. This is an understanding of human culpability more reminiscent of early Christianity than the normative Christianity of Augustine.

Having this dual understanding of human nature, Latter-day Saints are both suspicious and yet trusting of their leaders. Public figures are known to behave immorally and need to be kept in line. On the other hand, religious leaders are held to a higher standard, and are often revered for having risen above the natural tendencies of fallen man. Nobody is perfect, but for Latter-day Saints, there exists the potential (frequently actualized) of virtuous leadership.

Today

Nobody that has lived more than a few decades can deny that mortality brings with it an ample supply of aches and pains. We don’t need an understanding of the human genome to convince us that our body’s programming isn’t perfect. Some of us believe this is due to our heritage as descendants of Adam. Others argue that our physical imperfections are inevitable artifacts of opportunistic evolutionary change. These opposing perspectives may not agree on the cause of our woes but at least they can agree that we have them.

So why then do we insist on creating our modern societies as if we had no moral limitations? Do we believe that despite our physical imperfections that our mental capabilities are less corruptible? Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe we no longer believe that our moral limitations should color our public policies since we’ve already banished religion from the public square.

Whatever the cause of this moral myopia, it is clearly a dangerous condition to be in. And whether we agree with the Catholic Church or not about the inheritance of Adam’s transgression, we should at least be wise enough to agree that we have inherited an imperfect human nature, subject to the constraints of a fallen world (call it a Darwinian world if you like).

In our pluralistic society, we feel a lot more comfortable talking about criminals in public than we do about sinners. One of the failings of this occurs at election time when we hope to elect public officials that aren’t criminals and yet we have to expect, in all honesty, that they are imperfect (dare we say that they are sinners).

But by abandoning the truth of our dual natures - including the doctrine of original sin - we are leaving public officials free to construct our societies as if they - with their eminent wisdom - were fully capable of the task. Sadly, it is quite apparent that they are not.

If we were smart we would adopt a more realistic perspective. We would start to realize that people (including public people) will fail. In fact they will make the kinds of mistakes that constitute sin. And we should, in spite of our own imperfections, plan accordingly.

References

Tennant, F.R. 1968. The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin. Schocken Books, New York. 363 pp.

Schaff, P. 2002. History of the Christian Church, Vol. 8. Hendrickson Publishers. 890 pp. (originally published in 1858). Zwingli’s views on original sin are on pages 94-95.

Old Notes

2010-06-29T16:35:00.000-07:00

He opened up a book today
He hadn’t held in years
And found a penciled margin there
Intelligent and sure

A young aspiring reader with
A penetrating wit
Had managed with un-tempered lead
A calculating writ

He laughed just then and pursed his lips
An understanding hmm
For the wise author now long dead
Was laughing back at him

The Vital Desert

2010-06-16T16:18:00.000-07:00

Abraham lived in Ur of the Chaldees - a productive agricultural land. It was watered by a large river and enjoyed a predictable growing season. Many people lived there and raised families. Paleontologists tell us that it was a lot greener in Abraham’s time than it is now. It’s easy to imagine that it was a nice place to live.

Abraham, however, was not destined to remain there. When his life was threatened by the city’s priests, he fled, leaving the relatively easy life than an arable land makes possible. He wandered a long time before finding the place God had prepared for him. One might be tempted to think that he deserved a nice place after all the trouble he had experienced. Instead he was given a wild and uncultivated land. He was given a desert.

Many years later, Abraham’s descendents (the family of his grandson Israel) were living in another lush agricultural land. This time it was in Egypt along the Nile River. No place in the world enjoyed a better place to grow crops. Each year the riparian land received a flush of fertility during the annual floods. It was the preeminent place for civilization.

But the Children of Israel were not destined to remain in this abundant landscape either. Over the period of generations, they had changed from being honored guests of the Pharaoh, to being his slaves. They too fled from their homes, like Abraham before, and wandered a long way - not to a fruitful land, but back to the desert.

In the early 19th Century, the young and growing Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints found itself in the rich deciduous forests of the American Midwest. The handful of early converts had migrated from New York and Pennsylvania to northern Ohio with its rich muck soils. They cleared the land and raised crops. But they were not able to stay. After being forced from their homes they settled again along the fertile lands of the Mississippi River. But they would not remain long there either.

Soon after the Prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were martyred, the Saints packed up their belongings again and headed west. This time they left their fertile farms behind and pulled their wagons over the Rocky Mountains into the Salt Lake Valley - a high elevation desert.

And so it goes. A Chosen People is forced to flee from their homes. They rely upon the Lord for deliverance and direction, and He leads them to a Promised Land. Only this Promised Land isn’t really all that attractive. At least other people have pretty much left it alone, and for good reason: it doesn’t get much water. The Promised Land, as it turns out, is parched. In a word, it is a desert.

Is this all that a faithful people can hope for - sagebrush and sand? Or maybe this waterless wilderness isn’t meant to be a punishment at all but only the price one pays to be separated from the world. Or maybe - just maybe - there is something more. Maybe the desert is a particularly appropriate place for the People of God.

By definition a desert is a place that doesn’t get very much rain. When rain does fall, it often isn’t very predictable. The driest desert on earth is the Atacama Desert along the Pacific coast of South America. Some weather stations there have never recorded any rain at all. The Sahara and the Arabian Deserts usually get less than 4 inches of rain a year. The Gobi and Thar deserts usually get less than 10 inches. Other deserts get more. The Judean Desert gets less than 4 inches a year, although Jerusalem gets a bit more (averaging 19 inches). The Great Basin averages around 10 inches a year, although Salt Lake City averages around 16 inches.

What this means is that farming in these regions requires a lot of work. Wells have to be dug, or diversion canals have to be made. Yet even this does not guarantee a harvest. Fields have to be graded and then it still takes work to get water to the end of the row. Getting enough to eat is very much a dual effort. It requires a lot of physical work and it requires the bounties of the Creator. Because of this duality, the desert produces eminently practical and hardworking people with faith. And one can begin to see that living in a desert is less chastisement than a merciful gift. It is an opportunity to exchange a relatively carefree life for wisdom.

In its austerity, the desert is a great discounter of luxury and wealth. What matters more is sound judgment - and consistency. The desert may not give you a second chance.

Jacob Hamblin, one of the early settlers of the Mojave Desert, learned this the hard way. He lived along the Santa Clara River in Washington County, Utah during the late 19th Century. He was known for his wisdom in dealing with the Native Americans and learned a great deal from them. He knew, for example, that you could get water from the succulent leaves of a prickly pear cactus. You just had to get rid of the spines.

But one time Jacob found himself on the far end of the Mojave where there were plants he wasn’t familiar with. When he found himself without water he cut open the local variety of prickly pear - one that was colored a little different than he was familiar with - and quenched his thirst. A few hours later he was so sick he didn’t think he would survive. Fortunately for his family, he did, but not everybody is so fortunate.

Living in a desert says something about who you are. It’s like meeting someone at the top of a road-less mountain. You know they didn’t just get there by chance. No-one just happens upon the top of a mountain. You have to want to be there. So it is with the desert.

Even today with the luxuries of air conditioning, electricity and plenty of well water this continues to be true. But if most people are not cut out to live in the dessert, those that are will not be likely to leave it.

Perhaps it’s the magnificent sunsets, the wide open spaces, and the clear air that makes it so vital. Maybe it’s the magnificent carpets of wildflowers that bloom altogether after the rain. Or maybe it’s because of the loneliness or the austerity that broods there. Maybe it’s because the desert, like a mountain, is favored of God.

You might argue differently. After all, a moist forest enjoys a much greater abundance of living things. Clearly the Creator is partial to so much life. No doubt He is. But it is because of its abundance that it is so prone to human impiety. Human beings, after all, can live easily in a botanical paradise. And when things are easy, there is little reason to consider the divine.
The desert is different. Its very austerity is a repudiation of urban greed. There’s a reason the desert has been home for so many centuries to seekers of holiness. It offers itself as a holy place to those willing to work and do without the finer things in life. And in the absence of vainglory we can shed our shells of sufficiency. Then, as dependant sojourners in a harsh land, we find it is more natural to yield ourselves to God. Standing under a desert sky at night it becomes very apparent the He is not so very far away after all.

Adjectives I Have Kown and Loved (Aa-Am)

2010-05-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

Abdominous (ab DOM in us) means potbellied, which (for personal reasons) I interpret to be something more than just hefty. This is one of those diplomatic words that you might use in describing a long and difficult flight - sitting next to the abdominous gentleman in coach class.

Abstruse (ab STROOS) means difficult to understand. It’s a valuable word for those situations when somebody’s lecture went over your head and you’re looking for consolation without feeling stupid. “Boy that was a boring class,” you might say, “and it was so abstruse.”

Abyssal (a BIS ul) refers to the deep parts of the ocean. It can also mean unfathomably extreme. Because it is so clearly related to the word “abyss” it can also imply a bottomless pit. Perhaps your boss is making decisions that will have dire - even abyssal - consequences.

Accelerative (ak SELL ur a tiv) is an interesting word that has nothing at all to do with relatives that look like celery. It means speeding things up. It is possible, though, that your Great Uncle Ebenezer is suffering from an accelerative senility.

Acerbic (a SURB ik) means sour, acidic or sharp. Biting into a lemon can cause an acerbic sensation. Biting into your mother-in-law might cause one too.

Achromic (ay CROW mik) means having no color. January near the coast can make for foggy and achromic days. I imagine that spelunking can too.

Aculeate (a KYOO li it) refers to stingers - especially those of bees and wasps. But there is ample etymological (as well as entomological) precedent to use the word in other ways. Maybe you know someone who constantly engages in aculeate conversation.

Adipose (AD i poze) refers to fatty tissue and certainly lends itself to diplomatic descriptions. You might, for instance, describe a guest as a kind and adipose acquaintance. Or then again, you might not.

Adrenal (a DREE nul) refers to the kidneys and is usually restricted to medical usage. One can easily see other opportunities for it however. “I have to go take a wiz,” might be more politely expressed as, “excuse me, there’s been a bit of an adrenal development that I must attend to”.

Adumbral (ad UM brul) refers to shadows or being in a shadow. A forest is an adumbral place. A miser has an adumbral face. A bride can hide in adumbral lace.

Aestival (ES tu vul) refers to the summer, or to passing the hot (and possibly dry) summer in a state of dormancy. Why not take an aestival afternoon nap when its hot?

Affable (AF a bul) means approachable or easy to talk to. Not everyone has the gift of the affable salesman. But we all might become an affable friend.

Affined (a FIND) is an old word not much used anymore referring to an affinity between people or objects. Sometimes the affinity is one of kinship but it doesn’t have to be. It is a useful word that allows for meanings hard to describe in other ways. A good friend, for example, can be an affined brother or sister - implying a sentiment approaching kinship.

Agminate (AG min it) means gathered into clusters. Most people have agminate preferences. We do live in neighborhoods and cities after all. Unfortunately, traffic problems (and accidents) are often agminate too.

Agonistic (ag u NIST ik) means competitive or argumentative. Lawyers have a reputation for being agonistic. Too bad for you if your office-mate is too.

Agrarian (a GRAIR y un) is a rustic word referring to the land and agriculture. An agrarian life is a life of healthy work and simple pleasures. Those of us frustrated by urban frenzy spend the week planning our agrarian escapes.

Agrestal (a GRES tul) means growing wild like weeds. If you like planting things more than weeding, you undoubtedly have an agrestal garden. On the other hand, your teenage son, who may not like gardening at all, may very well have an agrestal bedroom.

Akimbo (a KIM bo) means having the hands on the hips with the elbows turned outward. An akimbo glare from your mother would be imposing, even to the point of being a threat. But if your mother put on a cowboy hat, went out back and stared akimbo at the evening sky you might say she was a romantic.

Alary (AY lu ree) might sound like a sickness of sorts. But in fact it refers to wings. I guess if you’re afraid of heights you might also suffer from an alary ailment of sorts.

Aleatory (AY lee a tor ee) is another audibly confusing adjective. It has nothing to do with wings. It instead refers to luck or gambling. It’s the blackjack dealer and not the stewardess that has an aleatory employment. Maybe you do too and just didn’t know it.

Algological (al gah LOJ i kul) refers to algae, or the study off algae. I admit that this is a technical term used almost exclusively by biologists but it sounds so gutturally pleasing that we must find other uses for it. Say you forget to clean the swimming pool, for example. Why not ascribe your delinquency to algological preferences. Or, next time you go to a Korean restaurant you might impress your date. Instead of asking for roasted laver flakes, ask instead for the algological appetizers. Maybe you like earth tones. You could decorate your room in an algological theme.

Alible (AL a bul) refers to something that is nourishing or full of nutrients. but the ending also gives it a sense of something edible (at least it does to me). You might very appropriately compliment the cook on her alible dinner.

Alliterative (a LIT ur a tiv) refers to words that have the same initial sound. One has to have a certain literary bent to appreciate alliterative phrases. In fact reading these definitions may strike one as being altogether alarmingly alliterative. But what can one do?

Alluvial (a LOO vee ul) refers to the sediment left by flowing water. It’s also an appropriate word for such places. A park by a river is an alluvial park. Make sure you have flood insurance if you buy a house in an alluvial development.

Alpine (AL pine) refers to high mountains. Watch out for the last syllable, though. Alpine environments are above timberline and don’t refer to pine trees (although pines are often nearby). Alpine flowers, however, do have their high altitude charm. And those of us who love mountains and their brilliant night skies are convinced of their alpine inspiration.

Altruistic (al tru IS tik) refers to a concern for the welfare of others. It can also mean valuing the needs of others above your own. Watch out for specious claims of altruistic behavior. People who advertise their so-called philanthropy are not altruistic at all.

Amandine (a man DEEN) refers to almonds. You might see it on the menu of a fancy restaurant (swordfish amandine, for example) and think it is a foreign word. Not so. Chances are you enjoy a crunchy amandine cereal for breakfast, or an amandine granola bar for lunch.

Ambient (AM bee unt) means surrounding. It is a useful word that needs to escape from the rut of always describing conditions. My office, for example, used to overlook a lake and ambient forest. What’s nice about this use is the sense of ambience that comes with it.

Ambrosial (am BRO zhul) refers to a fragrance or taste that is worthy of the gods. Perhaps your mother’s cooking is truly ambrosial. Maybe your boyfriend has an ambrosial preference in perfume.

Ambulatory (AM byu la tor ee) has nothing to do with ambulances or the transportation of the injured. It refers to walking. You might prefer a refreshing ambulatory evening in the park instead of a mindless evening in front of the TV. Maybe you should think about getting a dog if you want an ambulatory friend.

Amenable (a MEE nub ul) means willing to follow advice or accept authority. It can also refer to someone who is open to criticism. It seems like the only place I see this word is in reference to negotiations of one kind or another. But it is possible to have an amenable personality. Believe it or not, it is even possible to be an amenable leader.

Amorphous (a MORE fus) refers to a lack of form or shape. It can also refer to a lack of character. A formless fog might be an amorphous morning mist. Unfortunately it might also be the basis of your favorite senator’s foreign policy.

Review of The Creation by E.O. Wilson

2010-04-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

E.O. Wilson’s book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth was published by W.W. Norton & Company four years ago. It is a thin book, nothing like the author’s previous tomes about ants or Sociobiology. Nonetheless, this little book is important. It is Wilson’s attempt (as one of the most respected scientists alive today) to discuss with organized religion the loss of earth‘s biodiversity and to see what can be done about it. It is even an appeal for religion to join hands with science in this important undertaking (certainly no pun intended).

The book is a respectful gesture and an important one considering Wilson’s reputation and distinguished scientific career. It is nice to see an influential scientist acknowledging the need to work with the religious community. Wilson is from the South and his immediate audience is a Baptist Pastor. This, however, should not keep those of other faiths from reading the book. The issues are relevant to many religious groups; and Wilson, no doubt, would welcome all to the table.

Unfortunately, many of Wilson’s arguments will not set well with his intended audience. Not that life on earth isn’t religiously important - it is. The difficulty with Wilson’s approach is that it is too condescending. Even with his best intentions in mind - and it seems that they are genuine - he assumes a privileged position, even a moral high ground that can only distance his audience.

This, of course, is nothing new. It has always been the raw issue in so many disagreements between science and religion. Even so, I don’t mean to diminish Wilson’s contribution. If his book can start serious religious discussions about the importance of saving earth’s rich organic diversity, he will have done us a great favor.

Christian Interest in Natural History

There is a very real need to motivate religious people to take a larger interest in natural history, and Wilson has persuasively listed (in The Creation, The Diversity of Life, and elsewhere) many of the reasons why we should be motivated to do so. These include: economic reasons, medical discoveries, education, pleasure (including Biophilia) etc. There is one motivation, however, that he has missed. It is also the one motivation that is most important if we ever hope to bring about a renewal in religious natural history. This motivation is a desire to learn more about the Creator, by studying the Creation.

I say renewal because there is historical precedent for a Christian fascination with the natural world. (Perhaps other faiths have similar examples that I am not aware of.) Victorian England was so taken by the study of nature that it has come to be recognized as the Heyday of Natural History.

Lynn Barber describes the period thus: “Every Victorian lady, it seemed, could reel off the names of twenty different kinds of fern or fungus, and every Victorian clergyman nurtured a secret ambition to publish a natural history of his parish in imitation of Gilbert White. By the middle of the Century, there was hardly a middle-class drawing room in the country that did not contain an aquarium, a fern case, a butterfly cabinet, a seaweed album, a shell collection, or some other evidence of a taste for natural history…”

One reads about this time with wonderment at how many people were amateur naturalists - and the inescapable question becomes: could we ever regain that level of interest and enthusiasm? Sadly, I think, the answer is no, at least if we are restricted to Wilson’s list of motivations. The Victorian passion for nature was fueled by a combination of pleasure and education - two motivations acknowledged by Wilson. But even more important was the belief that one could understand things about God by studying the Creation. This passion was fueled by the belief that one could fulfill one’s religious duty and have fun at the same time. This combination of factors was strong enough to keep the English canvassing the countryside for natural curiosities for decades.

The reasons for the demise of this “heyday” aren’t all that clear. Part of the reason seems to be that natural history became too complicated for the amateur as more and more discoveries were made. Part of the reason also seems to be that, after Darwin, one could study nature without acknowledging the Creator. And, in fact, many scientists insisted on doing just that. Part of the reason was undoubtedly the inevitable changes of time.

Today the sciences of natural history are much more complicated than they were 150 years ago, and the divide separating science and religion is as great as it ever has been. Economic arguments to save species are laughably futile when it is so much easier to make money by tearing down a forest than to preserve it. Arguments from medicine fare no better. The hopes of decades past of harvesting complex biologically active molecules from nature have proven scarcely practicable. It’s much cheaper to make these molecules in an industrial reactor. Continuing advances in natural-products chemistry will ensure that this continues to be the case.

One can still make appeals to the beauty of the world but only a few people will listen. If there is any lesson for us hidden in the history of Victorian England, it is that we need to find convincing and meaningful lessons about life from nature if we seriously want to preserve her. Science is not able to do this. Religion can.

The Meaning of Life

Perhaps the most obvious difference between Wilson’s worldview and that of his audience is to be found on page 15, where he writes longingly for the time when nature will reveal (i.e. to a scientist) the great mystery of the meaning of human life. Statements like this can do little to solicit sympathy from Wilson’s religious audience.

Wilson is an acknowledged leader in evolutionary biology - a branch of science that is sometimes used to argue that reproductive success is the only meaning in life that there is. Wilson seems to be admitting that this is not enough. This is indeed an interesting admission but it seems naïve to me. Science has never been successful at answering questions of this kind. When it has tried, it has often led to disaster.

Many scientists decide not to go this far, deciding instead to follow the example of Wilson’s colleague at Harvard (the late Stephen Jay Gould) and restrict their research to what they can measure - the “ages of rocks,” say, and leave to religion the search for the “Rock of Ages” (Gould). Gould seems eminently wiser than Wilson on this count. Certainly religion has answered these questions so much more effectively than science has. This is, after all, their very raison d’être.

Asking a religious person to seek for the meaning of life from a scientist is like a sixth grader asking the school cook the value of taking physics - even while the physics teacher is sitting at the next table. It merges on the ridiculous. Wilson would make more friends and promote his agenda much more effectively if he would acknowledge this religious strength. The truth is that our religious faiths have rich traditions that value life, in all of its forms. Wilson’s failure to acknowledge this not only weakens his case, it reveals his lack of understanding about these traditions. He should have more faith in Faith. It has a much greater potential for saving life on earth than science does.

Human Nature

Another diplomatic mistake Wilson makes is his discussion about human nature. One would have expected a bit more sensitivity about this from the man who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, On Human Nature, and who has weathered many heated battles provoked by this controversial subject. His mistake is to believe that religious traditions will gladly accept a scientific explanation about who we, as human beings, are and then disregard their own deeply held beliefs.

To Wilson (a staunch materialist) our genetic make-up limits who we are. It is our culture - including our religions - that can and need to change, in order to save our planet. Wilson should know that religion will never accommodate this presumption in the least. The laws that govern human life - manmade laws, that is - may be arbitrary at times, like changing traffic rules, or public curfews. But religion also recognizes higher laws that do not change, laws that are less changing than the genes we have inherited from our parents.

Wilson wants us to believe that our religious traditions can change. He wisely refrains from saying that our moral codes evolve, but this is what he means. He wants to persuade American Christians that they can change their beliefs to accommodate a controversial agenda. This is a significant misjudgment on his part. Christians in general - and a Southern Pastor specifically - are not about to yield their belief in higher laws to the evolutionary arguments of a scientist. In fact Americans have a long history of refusing to yield the Higher Law to anybody. Call us stubborn if you like, but we based our national existence on this argument in the Declaration of Independence when we refused to yield it to a king. Magna Carta was an instance where we wouldn’t yield it to another king or even to the Pope.

Wilson would have done better if he had done his homework and learned about this commitment and about the rich discussions that thoughtful Christians are having (and have had) about the Creation and the Fall. There is much to be found here about stewardships and basic human responsibilities for the earth. I find these arguments much more persuasive than the economic candy cane that Wilson hopes to entice us with, and which amounts to nothing more than an appeal to our selfishness. The significant effort needed to save life on earth requires a much greater commitment than this. It requires a determination from a free and a devout people committed to a higher law.

Denial

In Chapter 9 Wilson warns us about denying our responsibilities to preserve life. He reminds us of our losses, including the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet. He also minds us of those species we have almost lost: the black robin, the ivory billed woodpecker, the bison. I have examples of my own to add to the list. Several insects that I have discovered myself (species that bear my name as author) are only known from small populations and from limited areas. Many Christians, me included, are keenly aware of the sad history of our environmental neglect, and that we are losing, at an alarming rate, so much of the Creation. But Wilson and his sympathizers need to know that our commitment is different than theirs. If we want to save life we will have to be committed to doing so on our own terms. We will not be persuaded by scientific arguments that lack understanding.

Let me add a little perspective here. Wilson thinks that religion was useful for a while but that science has taken the torch of progress and is lighting the way to a much richer understanding of life on earth. He outlines for us in Chapter 11 what some of these illuminating scientific goals are: the creation of a tree of life, improvements in medicine, knowledge of the chemical and electrical nature of the mind, the creation of life itself in a test tube, etc.

Now some of these are noble goals, but some of them are highly presumptuous. I fail to see here anything close to what a thoughtful Christian sees in the created order: an understanding of the Creator, insight into eternal laws, perspective about human dignity. Wilson has admitted elsewhere (see Consilience) that he can get along just fine without this kind of religious understanding. Yet he also admits that most people cannot. How then does he ever expect to create an army of Christian conservationists with such condescending arguments? One tends to feel either resentment or pity at his misjudgments, hardly agreement.

Intelligent Design

At times Wilson demonstrates a willingness to cooperate with his religious counterparts. Part V begins with a recognition that science does need religion to save the Creation. This is certainly an encouraging concession. Unfortunately it is followed by perhaps the biggest miscalculation in the book: Wilson’s discounting of Intelligent Design.

No doubt Wilson has a bone to pick with Christian Fundamentalists - even with the Pastor to whom he addresses his book. And he is certainly keen to make sure he does not appear to concede anything to their camp. But he should know that, by picking up his pen to write to about the Creation to a Southern Pastor, any cooperation will be impossible unless he is willing to strike a compromise on Intelligent Design - a very sensitive subject in the South.

I don’t mean by compromise that Wilson suddenly adopt creationist tenets. Nobody would believe him if he did. But one can believe in a Darwinian process in the development of Life and still acknowledge our limited understanding about its history. One can still admit that religion represents a valid (even a critical) orientation to the world. Great scientists have recognized this for as long as science has existed. If Wilson cannot concede that Intelligent Design may have its own valuable insights into the creation he has no dialogue with his Southern friends.

This is a shame. Intelligent Design is the most promising development to come along in years for leveraging a Christian ethic of conservation. It’s too bad that Wilson has not been more careful about this. He could have been so much more convincing. We are left waiting for someone wiser to pick up the cause - very likely this someone will be a Christian.

References

Barber, Lynn. 1980. The Heyday of Natural History. Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1999. Rocks of Ages, Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. The Ballantine Publishing Group, New York. (See page 6.)

Wilson, E.O. 1978. On Human Nature. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Wilson, E.O. 1998. Consilience, the Unity of Knowledge. Alfred A Knopf, New York.

Wilson, E.O. 2006. The Creation, an Appeal to Save Life on Earth. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.

Butch Cassidy Did Not Die in Bolivia

2010-04-10T20:08:00.000-07:00

My Grandfather Wells knew Butch Cassidy as a young man and worked with one of his partners. Below is his account taken from his personal history (copied with permission from my father's (Jerry D. Wells) Samuel Morgan Wells and Minnie Zoe Lisonbee. Brigham Young University Press, Provo, Utah 2003. pp. 13-15) that sheds light on the outlaw's final years. My grandfather was convinced that he did not die in Bolivia. You can read his account below and decide for yourself. I have no reason to doubt my grandfather who was an honorable man.

"I remember several times that Butch Cassidy and Ezra Leigh came and stopped at Alma’s place before they robbed the Castle Gate paymaster. To know them any one would never think they could rob anyone. They were very nice and polite young men. Everyone around there that knew them sure liked them. When we heard that they had robbed the Castle Gate paymaster, whose name was Carpenter, at first people wouldn’t believe it was them, they were such nice and harmless young men.

I have read several stories that was written about the robbers and how many robberies they committed and how many people they killed. Well, Robbers Roost gang weren’t out to kill people. They were out to steal from the rich and help the poor. For instance, Butch stopped at a place one day. There was just an old man and his wife. And the wife was crying. Butch wanted to know what was the matter, The woman told him that there was $500 mortgage past due on their home and the man was coming that day to take the place.

So Butch went out to his horse and in a few minutes returned and gave the woman twenty-five twenty-dollar gold pieces and told the woman to make the man give all the mortgage papers before she gave him the money. Then, when she got all the papers she should burn them right away. And he cautioned her the second time to not lay the papers down but to burn them.

Then Butch left. The man came alright, with the sheriff, to take possession. The lady asked the sheriff if he had all the papers and he told her he did. Then she gave the sheriff her money and he in turn gave her the mortgage papers. Then he gave the man the money. And it was getting late in the evening but the man didn’t get home with his $500.00 in gold. A man stepped out in the road and told him to give him the twenty-five twenty-dollar gold pieces that he had and the man obeyed because the man was holding a 45 on his middle. Then the robber told him to get off his horse and turn it loose and start it home, but to let the horse get a good start ahead of him—then he could walk home.

The sheriff stayed at the ranch with the old couple until dark. He was a little suspicious of where those old people got them twenty-dollar gold pieces. But he didn’t get anywhere with them. So he started home. When he got about a mile from the ranch he met a man coming along the road. And the stranger stopped and asked him if he knew where he could find a place to stop for the night. Butch said he was a stranger in the country. The sheriff told him there was a ranch about a mile back that he was satisfied he could stay and they each went their ways.

But Butch only stopped long enough to leave a note of congratulations and five twenty dollar gold pieces on their doorstep.

Now this story about Butch and the mortgage was told to me by Matt Warner and I believe he told me the absolute truth.

I knew Matt a long time. He was with the outlaw bunch at one time. But he was a man that anyone could depend on. I never heard of him telling a lie. I was with Matt quite a lot one winter. I hauled beef from Victor to Price one winter. He bought beef from Chris Jensen at Victor. My brother Bill, and I would help Matt kill the beef. Then we would load the beef in my car. Then Matt and I would take it to the butcher shop at Price. Matt told me how he came to be an outlaw and he told me his real name. His name was Willie Christensen.

The reason Matt Warner turned to be an outlaw—he got into a fight with the cop in his home town one night and thought he had killed the cop. The cop was in the hospital for a long time but he finally got all right. But during that (time) Matt had joined with a band of outlaws that had their headquarters in Brown’s Hole, which is located on Green River on the line between Utah and Wyoming.

When Matt left, he had a wife and two children, one boy and one girl. He said it was about 1 ½ years before he dared to go see his wife and family. He said then he would have to sneak in after dark and leave before daylight. It was just a few years after that Matt’s wife died. So Matt went to the funeral. While he was there the officers didn’t molest him. But after the funeral they nabbed him and was going to put him in jail. He submitted to arrest peacefully but he made one request of the two cops that had him and that was to let him have ten minutes alone in the house with his children.

So they took his gun and told him to go in and they would stand guard at the door, but for him not to try any tricks or they would kill him. He thanked them very kindly and told them he would always remember them. So he went in the house and closed the door.

But there was one thing the cops didn’t know and that was that, when Matt came home to visit his family, he made a secret getaway by a loose board in the bed room floor and two loose rocks in the foundation by some shrubs that grew behind the house. And they didn’t know that two young men that was to the funeral was in the barn with three saddle horses ready to go. Well, when fifteen minutes rolled around, the cops went in the house and the grandmother was all they could find in the house. And they never did find where Matt got out of the house.

The two strangers that was at Matt’s wife’s funeral was none other than Butch Cassidy and Ezra Lathe. No one knew them in that country at that time.

LeRoy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, was born and raised in Grass Valley in Southern Utah. He was raised in a Mormon town and attended L. D. S. church regularly. One night when he was escorting his lady friend home from Mutual there was a bully came along and tried to take the girl away from him and they got into a battle and LeRoy knocked the fellow out cold and he supposed that he had killed him. So he left and came to the Granite Ranch, here in Wayne County. Granite Ranch is eighteen miles south of Hanksville. The Ranch was owned by a cattle man by the name of Burr and all the desert between Granite Wash and Poison Spring Wash and the Dirty Devil River is called the Burr Desert.

Well, LeRoy Parker came to Granite Ranch and applied for a job as cowpuncher. Mr. Burr asked him what his handle was and he said it was Butch Cassidy. He stayed there about one year then he came to Hanksville and got a job from Charley Gibbons and worked for him quite awhile. Then he left and went on the outlaw trail and ended up in Brown’s Hole Wyoming.

The story of Matt Warner and Butch Cassidy was told to me by Matt Warner and the story of Butch Cassidy was told to me by Charley Gibbons after I came to Hanksvffle in 1935. And the story Matt and Charley told about Butch was identical so I believe they were true.

Charles Kelly of Fruita, Wayne County, Utah, wrote a book, the title of it is The Last of the Robbers Roost Outlaws, and in the story he had Butch and Ezra killed in South America. But, since I came to Hanksville, Charley Gibbons let me read a letter that Butch wrote him telling Charley that he, Butch had quit the outlaw trail and bought a ranch in Colorado, got married, and was living happy with a beautiful wife and two children. But Charley didn’t let me see what part of Colorado the letter came from."

Nicodemus

2010-04-02T14:50:00.000-07:00

“There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” - John 3:1-4

Nicodemus was a ruler of the Jews. This has been understood to mean that he was a member of the Sanhedrin, the ruling Jewish council of Elders. He is mentioned three times in the Gospel of John: once talking with Jesus, once defending Jesus before the Pharisees, and once helping in the burial of Jesus. In the later capacity he assisted Joseph of Arimathea, who was also a member of the Sanhedrin.

These acts of kindness to Jesus (along with possibly others) exposed both Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea to the ridicule of other Jewish leaders - especially during the delicate political situation at the end of Jesus’ ministry. Christian tradition accepts that Joseph of Arimathea was an adopted father of Jesus. Joseph the Carpenter was believed to have been an older man when he took Mary to wife. When he died, Jesus was still a boy. It is claimed that Joseph of Arimathea took it upon himself to care for the fatherless family (see Tuchman). He was said to have been a tin merchant and possibly a relative of the family. It is clear that he respected Jesus a great deal.

Nicodemus obviously respected Jesus as well. Perhaps he was introduced to him by Joseph. He was impressed enough to seek an evening meeting with him. It is often suggested that he sought out Jesus at night in order to be secretive - to avoid the criticism of his colleagues. This has been the traditional view among Christian commentators even though the argument is an indirect one – based only on the general wording of John 12:42-43, where it is recorded that there were many chief rulers that believed on Jesus but would not admit it because of the Pharisees. Significantly, no names are mentioned, or necessarily implied, in this passage.

What we do know about Nicodemus’s relationship with Jesus after their first visit can hardly be understood to be evasive. Near the end of Jesus’ ministry the Pharisees had arranged for certain officers to bring Him to custody. Nicodemus, standing up for Jesus asked them, “Doth our law judge any man before it hear him and know what he doeth?” (see John 7:50-53). Then after the crucifixion, Nicodemus is recorded to have brought a great deal (about 75 pounds) of expensive myrrh and aloes (John 19:39) for the burial of Jesus. What makes this even more significant is that he helped Joseph of Arimathea with the actual preparation of the body - making both of them unclean according to Jewish law to participate in the Passover (see Numbers 19:11).

There is even a suggestion in the Book of Mormon that nighttime visits by Jewish leaders in Jerusalem were not uncommon events. Nephi, after disguising himself as Laban (a Jewish leader living in Jerusalem) was greeted by Zoram (Laban’s servant) who, “spake unto [Nephi] concerning the elders of the Jews, he knowing that his master, Laban, had been out by night among them” (I Nephi 4:22.). It is possible that Nicodemus likewise met with Jesus at night in order to enjoy a more relaxed and intimate conversation with Him.

Another criticism of Nicodemus is that he lacked faith - that he relied on (and was overly proud of) his rational gifts. Chrysostom (the late 4th Century Archbishop of Constantinople) argued that his use of the word “how” (in, “How can a man be born when he is old?” – John 3:4) is evidence of this.

“For the “how” is the doubting question of those who have no strong belief, but who are yet of the earth. Therefore Sarah laughed when she said, “How?” And many others having asked this question, have fallen from the faith.”

Chrysostom wrote at a time of great sectarian division within the church. Many of his detractors were individuals that asked probing and faithless questions and it is understandable why he would feel the way he did. But his tendentious views, projected on to Nicodemus, can hardly pass as a rule of human nature. Sadly, it seems that Chrysostom’s negative view of Nicodemus has been copied ever since by theologians and commentators alike who have not given the subject much more thought. The evidence alone from John’s gospel is certainly insufficient to argue against the faith of Nicodemus (see note by Black).

A more realistic view of Nicodemus is that he was a successful Jewish man that had risen to the leading council of his society and yet who genuinely sought to understand the message of Jesus. Perhaps he had developed a friendship with one of his colleagues (Joseph of Arimathea) who had told him about Jesus and then sought out a time to speak with Him directly. There is nothing in his conversation with Jesus to suggest that he was being unduly critical, disrespectful or doubtful. Very likely he just wanted to learn more about Jesus.

In fact John records that Nicodemus used two revealing words in this conversation that show a significant amount of respect. First, Nicodemus greets Jesus with the title rabbi. This is a title of great respect. (Of the three increasingly respectful forms of this title: rab, rabbi and rabban - rabbi is an intermediate form (See G.C. Morgan)). Jesus had not yet openly declared Himself to be the Son of God and Nicodemus had no reason to use the highest form. That he used the title rabbi at all is quite significant coming from one of the leading authorities of the law, who was used to being called by that title himself. Nicodemus was used to the company of the brightest and wisest Jews of his day. He met with them on a regular basis - sometimes daily. Jesus was not part of this group, and yet Nicodemus recognized His wisdom nonetheless.

The second revealing word Nicodemus used was teacher (or master). I say this was the second word advisedly because the word rabbi means teacher in Hebrew. Almost all versions of John’s gospel indicate that Nicodemus addressed Jesus with the title rabbi and then recognized that He was a teacher sent from God. This distinction exists even in the Vulgate and the Greek New Testament. It is likely, though, that Nicodemus used the same word twice: rabbi.

This is significant because a teacher (rabbi) among the Jews was significantly more important than a teacher as we understand the word today. It was more important even than how the Romans and the Greeks understood the word. A teacher, for example, who passed along information, was a didaskalos. A teacher who lived by and conveyed the teachings of another was a mathetes (a disciple). But someone who was a true teacher had the truth within themselves - receiving it directly from God.

This is a very important theme for John. He points it out on a number of occasions: that truth comes from above, is manifest in Jesus, and is perceived by the spirit of truth. John wants us to know up front that Jesus is a teacher of this higher form. It is also significant that Nicodemus seems to have recognized this too - at least in part.

That such a man would use direct questions is perfectly understandable. It is also clear from his subsequent behavior that he respected Jesus a great deal. A simple inference from a nighttime interview with the Master does not imply that Nicodemus was morally weak. The truth is that there are more human failings written about Peter in the gospels, then there are about Nicodemus - and yet we recognize Peter as the leader of Christ’s church and one of the greatest men that ever lived. Nicodemus, it seems to me, deserves to be more favorably remembered.

Literature Cited

Black, Matthew. 1967. An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts. Hendrickson Publishers. Black shows (page 160) that Nicodemus’s question is part of an Aramaic or Hebrew parallelism. In this light, Nicodemus’s question may be more properly viewed as a literary or rhetorical emphasis, than an implication of disrespect.

Chrysostom, John. Homilies on the Gospel of John 24:4. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Hendrickson Publishers, 2004 (Vol. 14, p. 85).

Morgan, G.C. The Gospel According to John. 15th ed. Fleming and Revell Co. See page 57. See also Alma 18:13 (in The Book of Mormon) where Ammon is called Rabbanah, which is possibly a related form of rab.

The Book of Mormon. 1981. Published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version. 1979. Published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Tuchman, Barbara. 1984. Apostle to the Britons: Joseph of Arimathea, in Bible and Sword (Chapter 2). Ballantine Books, New York.

Small Farms and the 2nd Amendment

2010-03-29T17:09:00.000-07:00

The appeal of the small farm - along with organic gardening, buying locally grown produce, and otherwise lauding the agrarian ideal - is now an established part of American society, albeit a minor one. But, notwithstanding its growing appeal, it will remain a minor part for one very important (and obvious) reason: it isn’t economically rewarding.

Of course this could change if (perhaps when) the global economy fails to recover from its ongoing series of cardiac arrests. Places burdened with failed economies (at least with failed modern economies) have often been sustained by widespread agrarian livelihoods. Surprisingly, such places still exist today in: Africa, Indonesia, Cuba, etc. But they are poor - very poor.

The recent disaster in Haiti has rekindled interest in this dilemma (see Steven Stoll’s article in this month’s Harper’s Magazine: Toward a Second Haitian Revolution). Is it worthwhile pursuing an agrarian economy – even a small one - that reduces hunger and massive unemployment even if it means putting a cap on economic development?

The answer to this question is obviously, “yes”. In fact this is even true for developed countries that are used to (and demand) a higher standard of living. I don’t mean that we abandon the free market - far from it. I do mean that national security, if it is based at all on individual and family security, requires an agrarian independence of some sort.

This is fairly intuitive. Having your food supplied by somebody else always carries with it an element of risk. What is less appreciated is that the same logic that calls for an increase in the number of small farms also calls for the defense of those farms. And, however effective local police forces may be, farmers have never been comfortable relying on them completely. However unpopular it may be, the defense of small farms requires (has always required) guns.

This is not the kind of logic one gathers from big cities. Where crime is so apparent and poses a constant threat, it is only natural that there will be a call to get guns out of the hands of criminals. But let’s face it the call for an agrarian reform is all about repudiating urban logic.

Our motivations for moving to the country are manifold: they center on a simpler life, they provide a therapy of physical work, they exist in a cleaner environment, and they are more secure. These motivations are well understood by thousands - even millions - of us. But only a small fraction of these agrarian sympathizers will ever be able to actually move to a farm and make a living there. The technology that makes our food so cheap is not itself cheap. To make the purchase of combines, pumps and spray equipment requires a lot of land. Small farms just don’t make economic sense.

Billions of city-dwellers will always argue for big farms and fewer guns. For them, this is what makes security and cheap food possible. But in spite of this, there is still a very real increase in the number of small farms across America. In spite of the economic hurdle, people are returning to the land. Some of these people have jobs that allow them to work from home - from a farm house, that is. Others are wealthy enough to live where they want. Some live in small enough communities that they can commute to work and still farm when they get home. Some people just don’t mind being poor as long as they can control their own lives and provide security and freedom for their families - in a way that they choose. These people also have guns.

Sometimes the guns are used to scare off the deer and rabbits. Sometimes they are used to bring down a deer or a rabbit to eat. Sometimes guns have to be used for self-defense. The truth is that a return to the life of small farms - with all of its benefits - is a return to a life needing guns. Freedom - even national security - requires it.

Character and Promises

2010-03-12T18:35:00.000-08:00

There aren’t many transcendent things that we take seriously these days. And many of the things we do think are important occupy only a small part of our lives. Most of what we do revolves around employment, entertainment and the constant juggling of immediate priorities. Sadly none of these commitments necessarily leads us to the building of character - a concern that used to preoccupy the greatest individuals of history.

It isn’t really obvious how transcendence and the building of character are related. The key to understanding how they are linked lies in the way that we keep promises. Bear with me for a few minutes and I’ll try to explain.

I first became aware of the empowering nature of promises from Stephen R. Covey, many years ago. He mentioned that one could gain self-confidence by making a promise to oneself and then keeping it. He recommended starting with small promises in order to be successful, then moving on to greater ones. I have thought about this often and, with varying degrees of success, have practiced the principle. I can speak from experience that Mr. Covey’s principle is a correct one.

I have also learned that it is a sad commentary on our society that this very important principle has been nearly forgotten. This is not just a new management gimmick (Covey never suggests that it is). It has been at the very core of our moral development for millennia. Sadly, we are more likely to regard the keeping of promises today if it leads to professional success rather than to moral excellence. When this happens we trivialize a transcendent process.

For example, it might be argued that we really do keep promises. We just don’t call them by that name. If my wife asks me to pick up a gallon of milk at the store, and I agree to do it, I have essentially made a promise. Our lives are filled with these kinds of agreements. How then can I say that we don’t make promises?

This is where a little bit of historic perspective is helpful. In the past, not all promises were the same. Simple neighborly promises - social courtesies - have certainly been part of our lives for a long time, just like they are today. If a lot was at stake, our ancestors learned to formalize promises into legally binding agreements - or contracts. We do the same today. But this was only a part of the promises our ancestors lived by.

The Old Testament and other early Near Eastern documents contain many examples of promises made to God. Many of these promises were binding. - meaning that consequences were specified if they were not kept. Oaths tended to be binding agreements spoken in a public place where God’s help was requisitioned after a petitioner kept a promise. A vow tended to be a promise made by a petitioner if God provided certain blessings.

Other promises included covenants which were formal and legally binding agreements between two parties, and could be religious or civic in nature. A pledge was another kind of formal promise between individuals. We have an analogous example in wedding rings. They are promissory in nature and much more formal than a promise to buy milk. All of these ancient promises to God were similarly binding.

The importance of these different kinds of promises is lost on most of us today. Sadly, this misunderstanding even affects the way we understand sacred texts. Written religious truths that have universal application are not understood as possible individual pledges to God. But they can be, and should be.

Take for example John 8:31-32: “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” This is an important conditional statement as it is written. But it has the potential of transforming one’s search for the truth if it were to be made a binding agreement between God and a sincere seeker of wisdom.

Another example, that is significant to my family, is Ether 12:27 (in The Book of Mormon). It was the favorite scripture of my grandmother - a Danish immigrant who in mid-life became paralyzed when a physician inadvertently cut her sciatic nerve:

“And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.”

The truths expressed in these verses are certainly truths for all people. But part of the reason that they are universal truths is because they have individual meaning in a broad number of circumstances. It is possible for someone to enter into one of these promises with God in a formal and individual way. The scriptures are full of these kinds of promises just waiting for those who wish to sanctify their lives.

Those that have formally joined a religion may not have realized that their initiation also involved a promise to God. This was a lot clearer historically before infant baptism became established - when promises to God were more important than institutionalized forms of worship. It isn’t clear in the Gospels that the Last Supper (when the sacrament was first offered) had anything at all to do with baptismal covenants. But the early Christians understood that it did.

Justin Martyr (in The First Apology of Justin, Chapter XLV, Administration of the Sacraments) wrote:

“But we … in order that we may offer hearty prayers in common for ourselves and for the baptized person … salute one another with a kiss. There is then brought to the president of the brethren bread and a cup of wine mixed with water; and he taking them, gives praise and glory to the Father of the universe, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and offers thanks at considerable length for our being counted worthy to receive these things at His hands.”

In The Book of Mormon this relationship between the sacrament and baptism is even more clearly expressed (in 3 Nephi 18:3-5) where it is recorded how Jesus established the sacrament among the Nephites:

“And when the disciples had come with bread and wine, he took of the bread and brake and blessed it; and he gave unto the disciples and commanded that they should eat… [and said] there shall one be ordained among you, and to him will I give power that he shall break bread and bless it and give it unto the people of my church, unto all those who shall believe and be baptized in my name.”

Today we live in a time of great equalizing influences. This is a great boon to many people. Unfortunately, many of these same influences have become morally equalizing as well - diluting any lingering sense of divine involvement in our lives. In fact this equalizing epidemic has sapped many of us of any desire for personal excellence - of the desire to develop personal character. The corollary is that for those having little interest in developing character, the keeping of promises is of hardly any interest. And when we stop making and keeping promises, we cut ourselves off from most of what can be transcendent in our lives.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a great strength available to anyone who is willing to make and keep promises. Social promises are nice and usually easy to keep. They are a good place to start. Personal promises are more difficult – but also more rewarding. They are also much less common. This is the place where character is discovered and built.

But it is when personal promises become promises to God that the truly transforming – and transcendent - miracle occurs. This is the point of the Greek metanoia - the turning of our minds away from the world, towards God. It is the place of repentance.

True repentance is a promise kept. It is a promise kept to oneself and to God and is both the refining fire and the proof of real character. Those that remain true to these promises are the strongest individuals among us. Our fathers and mothers knew this. It was part of their understanding of character. We would be wise to follow their example.

The Elephant Glyphs at Copan

2010-02-23T16:51:00.000-08:00

Among the most enigmatic pre-Columbian glyphs in Meso-America are the elephant images on Stela B at Copan. There are two of them carved into the upper corners of the stone and only the heads and trunks are represented. When they were first discovered and copied, over 150 years ago, there was a human figure riding on top of one of the elephants looking very much like an Indian mahout, or elephant driver. This image has subsequently been broken, or perhaps eroded off.

The reason the elephants are so enigmatic is because they are not supposed to have existed in America since their extinction some 10,000 years ago when either human hunters or changing environments are believed to have caused their demise.

These glyphs are not the only representations of elephants that have been found in America (see Totten for examples of elephant figures carved in bone, on a votive tablet, on a pipe, etc.). But they are the only ones that can’t be easily dismissed as forgeries. This doesn’t mean that non-elephant explanations have not been proposed - they have. The images themselves, though, are so evidently elephantine that the question remains unanswered: what do they mean?

Did the Maya, their neighbors, or their descendents have firsthand experience with elephants? The images seem to argue that they might have. In so doing they support either a diffusionist argument (that there were pre-Columbian contacts between the Old and New Worlds) or that elephants existed in the same environments as late pre-Columbian Americans (and validating the reference to elephants in the Book of Mormon: Ether 9: 19), or both. It is little wonder that there have been disagreements on the subject.

The first reproduction of the images was published in 1836 by Frederick Catherwood (see opposite page 156 in John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan – my Figure 1). Many details are missing in this drawing and it isn’t clear that the corner glyphs are of elephants. The representation of the elephant driver is likewise difficult to interpret. Stephen’s, however, in the text, recognizes that the images do look like elephants. He writes: “The two ornaments at the top appear like the trunk of an elephant, an animal unknown in that country” (Stephens, p. 156).

Sometime after Incidents of Travel in Yucatan was published, Alfred Maudslay in his monographic study of Meso-American archaeology reproduced the images in much more detail (Figure 2). These are more visibly representative of elephants. It’s interesting, though, that Maudslay suggests that the images might represent a tapir (an animal phylogenetically related to an elephant but appearing quite different). This is a bit odd and might be an understandable explanation of the Catherwood images; but Maudslay's own drawings make it hard to draw the same conclusion. One is left wondering if the original glyphs are not very well represented in his own work (although this seems unlikely given his accurate renderings of other extant glyphs). Another more likely explanation is that he was aware of the controversy that elephants would pose to his work; and, rather than having to deal with the negative publicity, conveniently side-stepped the issue.

In 1924 Elliott Smith (Chair of Anatomy at the University College London) criticized Maudslay and a handful of others for suggesting that the glyphs could be anything other than elephants. His book, Elephants and Ethnologists, is a careful argument for an Asian influence in Meso-America before Columbus.

Smith’s main evidence includes the distinctly Asian elements in Stela B itself (including the spiral images and the mahouts - assuming that there were, in fact, two of them) and the many other glyphs representing stylized creatures from Hindu mythology - the so-called makara images. These creatures are usually represented as crocodiles or dolphins but also as fish or elephants (see Figure 3). Very often a single image is made up of parts of more than one creature. Deities, such as the goddess Ganga, or other human figures are usually associated with these creatures. Often they are represented inside a creature’s mouth.

Smith argues that, not only are all these elements represented in comparable Mayan glyphs, but the Mayan glyphs also have the same overall sense of the Hindu makara, even down to the scales around the eyes. To argue for an independent development of these figures is, to Smith, nothing more than a veiled bias of preconceived notions.

Since Elephants & Ethnologists was published Smith’s arguments have been mostly ignored. They have not been convincingly disproved. Part of the reason for the academic silence has been that most diffusionist arguments have been out of favor in an increasingly nationalistic world that was eager to recognize contributions of individual cultures (see Mair). Another reason has been the uncertainty about Native American elephants themselves. When Smith made his argument, it was just coming to the attention of anthropologists that ancient humans even lived at the same time as extinct elephants (such as mammoths or mastodons).

Humans and Mammoths

The very idea that some kinds of animals and plants have gone extinct came to the world’s attention through the work of Georges Cuvier and his study of elephants (see Rudwick). Cuvier established that the elephant bones that were being discovered in Europe during the later part of the 18th Century were of different species than either the African or the Indian elephants. This suggested that extinctions had occurred prior to the advent of humans in Europe because there were no known records of a third species living in the northern hemisphere. There were occasional voices arguing that the third elephant might still be living in remote areas. Cuvier’s argument, however, was that there were no human remains or tools associated with any of the elephant remains and that humans had never known the extinct species.

Later, finds of mammoth paintings in caves throughout Europe clearly indicated that Cuvier was wrong. Not only had cave-dwelling humans known of mammoths but, as it turned out, they had hunted them as well. Proof of this was to be found in the Americas where extinct elephant bones were found with arrowheads.

Anthropologists and paleontologists then started asking themselves if humans had been the reason why the large animals had gone extinct, or were other factors, such as environmental changes, the cause of their demise. These questions still remain open. What is normally accepted, however, is that the American elephants went extinct around 10,000 years ago despite claims that it survived into historical times.

This date has been held inviolable by many authors for some time although earlier dates have been published. A comprehensive review of dated North American mega-faunal fossils (see Mead and Meltzer) shows a clear peak in the number of recovered fossils from around 10,000 years ago. But a few fossils do extend after this period. The most recent date for a mammoth was taken from Sandy, Utah and dated at 4,885 years ago. Some of the samples taken for these recent dates are of only average quality but enough extend past the 10,000 year mark to suspect that a major extinction, whatever the cause, did not eliminate all individuals at that time. From a strictly statistical standpoint the distributional peak is clearly around 10,000 years ago, but outlying data points would be expected earlier and later as Mead and Meltzer’s data indicate. The door is still open on this issue. A few surviving populations of mammoths in North and Central America may have survived into recent times.

There are two major groups of elephants known to have occurred in America - the mastodons (belonging to the family Mastodontidae) and the true elephants (belonging to the family Elephantidae). The two groups, though often similar in size and general appearance, are easily separated by their teeth. The chewing teeth of mastodons have conical projections along the grinding surface. True elephants, on the other hand, have a labyrinth of ridges. Other morphological characters undoubtedly occur but it is the teeth that resist decomposition and are more likely to appear in the fossil record. Both the African and the Indian elephants are true elephants as are the various mammoth species that have been discovered.

That said, there have been a number of mastodon species in America. Most of them lived before the periods of Pleistocene glaciation. The long-jawed mastodonts, for instance, lived on the plains as far west as the Rocky Mountains up until Pliocene times. Tetralophodonts and Serridentias, known to have migrated from the Old World, did as well. Other species included the short-jawed mastodons (true mastodons of the genus Mammut), the beak-jawed mastodons, and the notorostrines. The later two species occurred in Central America, although not into the glacial periods.

We only know of one mastodon species (Mammut americanum) that survived through the Pleistocene and lived concurrently with humans in America. It was a forest species and, as a consequence, did not lend itself to fossilization as readily as mammoths did (that seemed to frequent boggy areas more frequently). The first full skeleton of a mastodon was unearthed in 1845 south of New York City by a crew digging for peat. Since then, other remains have been discovered throughout North America and as far south as Honduras (see Polaco). It is unlikely that the American mastodon was the model for the Copan glyphs. It is unlikely to have lived as recently as the period up to or immediately prior to the rise of Central American civilization. Moreover, its low (or flatter) head is quite different than the heads of the elephants depicted in the glyphs.

The other elephants that were known to live concurrently with humans in America were the mammoths. The best known species is the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) that lived in northern regions and is the mammoth species that commonly turns up in frozen burials. A dwarf form of the wooly mammoth survived on Wrangel Island (in the Arctic Ocean) up until 1700 BC.

The Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) had a more southerly distribution. It ranged throughout North America and as far south as Nicaragua. It was believed to have gone extinct around 10,000 BC along with many other species, although more recent dates have been reported. The Columbian mammoth is most likely the species represented on Stela B at Copan if, in fact, it represents an American species at all. Its demise is the most recent of all the American elephant species and its head rises above the eyes as depicted in the glyphs. It was a large animal, fully capable of carrying an elephant driver.

Other American mammoth species are less likely candidates. The pygmy mammoth (M. exilis) from the Channel Islands of California was probably too small to support an elephant driver and it seems to have been restricted to the islands. The Jefferson mammoth (M. jeffersonii) and the imperial mammoth (M. imperator) did not occur as far south and may turn out to be the same species as the Columbia mammoth with further taxonomic evidence (the justification for recognizing the different species is primarily the size and shape of the tusks which are known to vary).

Asian Elements in America Before Columbus

Another explanation for the elephant glyphs is that they were made by emigrants from Asia who brought their cultural images (including images of elephants) with them to Central America. The difficulty with this explanation is that Asian peoples were not believed to have had contact with America before Columbus - at least that has been the scholarly consensus. Nonetheless, evidence for pre-Columbian contacts has been put forward from quite early in the history of American exploration.

Alexander von Humboldt, for example, noticed a handful of similarities between the calendars, legends and religious symbols of Asia and Central America as early as 1813. His work had a significant influence on both John Lloyd Stephens and William Prescott (The Conquest of Mexico) whose works were largely responsible for bringing early Central American civilization to the attention of the world (see Helferich).

Other influential arguments for early cultural contacts across the Pacific included Elliott Smith (as noted above), Betty Meggers et al., Joseph Needham, and Stephen Jett. Meggers showed remarkable similarities between the pottery of the Valdivia and Machalilla phases of coastal Ecuador and the pottery of the Jomon period in Japan. Joseph Needham showed several similarities between the two continents. One of his findings included the importance of jade in both places, where pieces (often painted red) that were placed in the mouth of the dead. Other findings included images of rabbits on the moon, sailing craft, etc. Stephen Jett’s work has revealed the sophisticated similarities in blowgun technologies.

These are just a few of the many examples that have come to light over almost two centuries now. John Sorenson’s exhaustive two-volume bibliography of trans-oceanic contacts before Columbus lists hundreds of sources discussing contacts between Asia and the Americas (see Sorenson and Raisch).

It seems that Smith’s arguments, that elephant glyphs at Copan are evidence of a transplanted Asian influence among the Maya, continues to deserve attention. Certainly the presence of mahouts on top of the elephants and the spiral element that is typical of the Hindu makaras suggest a cultural connection. The images of the elephants themselves also resemble Indian elephants.

Smith argued that these images were carved from artifacts that had been carried from Asia, and not that the artisans had carved them from living elephant models. His main argument for this was that there were morphological errors in the carvings. He believed that of the two openings in the mid-section of the head, that the posterior one represented an eye and the anterior one represented a nasal opening. Since elephants don’t have nasal opening in this position, it must be a mistake made by an artist without firsthand knowledge of elephants.

Smith didn’t consider the obvious possibility that the anterior organ represents an eye and the posterior one represents an ear. I say obvious because they are positioned where an eye and an ear should be. The only trouble with this explanation is that it makes the ear quite small - at least compared to the ears of living elephants.

Both living species of elephants have much larger ears. The Indian elephant has smaller ears than the African elephant but even these smaller ears are several times larger than the organ positioned where the ear should be on the Copan glyphs. If these glyphs do represent Indian elephants then Smith is right, they are stylized and were very likely reproduced either as a cultural memory or were copied incorrectly from a model carried from Asia.

Another possibility, however, is that the elephant glyphs do not represent Indian elephants at all but rather American mammoths. A century ago we didn’t know what mammoth ears looked like. We now do and it seems obvious in hindsight that they are small.

Mammoths are from a line of elephants adapted to colder climates where large appendages are maladaptive. This can be seen in living rabbits, for example. Species living in hot southern regions have large ears to dissipate heat more easily. Arctic species have much smaller ears. The same seems to have been the case for other mammals including mammoths.

In recent years, a handful of mammoths have been recovered from permafrost and the size of their ears is now known. They are small. Several images of these freeze-dried animals can be seen on-line, although caution needs to be taken when viewing their ears. Not all of them are in-tact or genuine. The ears of the Brerezovka mammoth, for example (on display in the Russian Academy of Sciences) have been reconstructed because they didn’t survive the excavation. Likewise the right (and most frequently photographed) ear of the baby Lyuba mammoth has been nibbled off.

So where does this leave us regarding the elephant glyphs at Copan? We do have quite a better view of ancient trans-oceanic migrations than we did when Smith wrote Elephants and Ethnologists. We also know a good deal more about American elephants. But the jury is still out. The Asian elements on Stela B make a strong case for an Asian influence. This has not changed since Smith’s writing. But it could very well be a mistake to presume that the Maya didn’t know about American elephants themselves.

Works Cited and Notes

Helferich, G. 2004. Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humbolt and the Latin American journey that changed the way we see the world. Gotham Books, New York.

Jett, Stephen C. 1970. The Development and Distribution of the Blowgun. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60 (4): 662-688.

Mair, H. Victor. Kinesis versus Stasis, Interaction versus Independent Invention; in, V.H. Mair ed. (2006) Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World. University of Hawai’i Press. Honolulu (see page 11).

Maudsley, Alfred. 1900. Biologia Centrali Americana (Archaeology, 1889-1902), Part II. Plates XXXIII to XXXIX. I have not seen this work. Figure 2 is taken from Smith’s monograph.

Mead, J.I and D.J. Meltzer. 1984. North American Late Quaternary extinctions and the radiocarbon record; in, P.S. Martin and R.G. Klein, Quaternary Extinctions, a prehistoric revolution. The University of Arizona Press. Tucson, Arizona.

Meggers, B.J., C. Evans and E. Estrada. 1965. The early formative period of coastal Ecuador; the Valdivia and Machalilla phases. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, No. 1:1-234.

Needhamm, J. and L. Gwei-Djen. 1985. Trans-Pacific echoes and resonances; listening once again. World Scientific, Singapore and Philadelphia.

Osborn, Henry Fairfield. 1925. The Elephants and Mastodonts Arrive in America. Natural History 25(1):3-23.

Polaco, O.J. et al. 2001. The American Mastodon Mammut americanum in Mexico; in, G. Cavarretta et al. The World of Elephants - Proceedings of the 1st International Congress, Rome.

Rudwick. Martin J.S. 1997. Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geologic Catastrophism, New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Grafton Elliott. 1924. Elephants and Ethnologists. E.P. Dutton & Co. New York. 1315 pp. Smith was an Australian anatomist who was drawn into the early diffusionist debate from his work on Egyptian mummification, that he saw influencing cultures throughout the ancient world. During his career he also held a traveling scholarship at Cambridge, served as Chair of the Cairo School of Medicine, as Professor of Anatomy in Manchester, and later served on the British General Medical Council. A biography on Smith can be found under: Smith, Grafton Elliott, in P. Serle, Dictionary of Australian Biography. 1949.

Sorenson, John L. and M.H. Raish. 1996. Pre-Columbian contacts with the Americas across the oceans, an annotated bibliography. Research Press, Provo, Utah.

Totten, Norman. 1981.Precolumbian [SIC] Elephants - From Birds to Invisibility. The Epigraphic Society, Occasional Publications Vol. 9 (no. 215).

A Sympathetic Agrarian

2010-02-05T16:11:00.000-08:00

There is a sizeable number of would-be agrarians in America that live in cities. I am one of them. We are a varied lot with different experiences and desires. I don’t pretend to represent all of us. Nonetheless, I do offer a few insights into how an agrarian at heart can be true to himself (and possibly herself too) even while living in a city or a town.

My insights come from over two decades of dealing with this conflict: between where I live and where I want to live. The formative years of my youth were spent on a small farm in Utah Valley. I grew up cleaning the barn, milking goats, and irrigating the orchard and garden at all hours of the day and night. I learned from experience not to lick an ice-covered fence post, and that one should take care in flaying a rabbit not to puncture the digestive tract. I didn’t enjoy getting up early to do the chores before school. But I did come to love the miracles of new life in the spring, of summer rain storms, and the wild mountains that started almost from our back yard.

Since then I have lived in a dozen cities and have fond memories of each place. Nonetheless, my desire for a simpler agrarian life has remained with me wherever I go. I make a living doing agricultural research and this has provided me with some rural opportunities. But it has also been a constant reminder to me that I no longer live a rural life.

In my efforts to pull myself out of a recurring rural nostalgia, I have come to rely on three agrarian helps that are very applicable to city life. In fact they are keys for me (a sympathetic agrarian) to making city life meaningful.

The first and most important thing is to work. There are, of course, many kinds of work and not all of them are agrarian helps. Work in front of a computer, no matter how worthy the cause (such as writing an agrarian essay) doesn’t qualify. Work on the phone, in any of it’s modern forms, doesn’t qualify either. There are, however, a surprising number of other kinds of work that do qualify: washing the dishes by hand, planting and caring for a garden (no matter how small), repairing the lawn mower, polishing the silver, cleaning the shed (or garage). The list is nearly endless. The key part of qualifying work is to be doing it - and to be doing it with a conservative or a creative deliberation.

This may sound a bit too obvious but it needs to be emphasized. Work means that we’re not lost in mindless past-times that are the bane of our time (and the primary reason for the epidemic of our whole-body neuromuscular neglect). Mindlessly watching television or engaging in computer games neither conserves nor creates anything. As possible ways to relax after an honest day of work, they may be nice. But they should never be confused for agrarian helps.

Another important help is to develop trusted friendships. One of the givens of rural life is to know your neighbors. City life is quite a bit different. In fact I hardly know who the people are that live on our small street. We wave to each other to be courteous and at Christmastime we take each other treats. But they know next to nothing about us and we know next to nothing about them.

In the more rural area where I grew up, I knew who lived in every house along the street - not just the mom and dad, but everybody - including the dogs. Come to think of it, I even had lunch (at least once) in every one of those houses.

We got along as neighbors pretty well too (most of the time) and helped each other out when we found ourselves in need of it. One time our next-door neighbor Denny managed to rope our runaway cow Lulubell and bring her to heel. He somehow lapped the rope around a big cherry tree and slowed her down. I also remember helping my friend next door move a truckload of rocks so we could play basketball together. I ended up smashing my finger and couldn’t play after all. Life was usually a team effort, even with the accidents.

Less than a mile from where we lived was a subdivision. Houses there were on small lots (like the one I live in now). I only knew a few of the people who lived there. We had very little sense of community with them.

It is certainly one of the ironies of our time that the closer we live to one another, the less we seem to know of each other. But life in a city does not have to be that way. There are people in your neighborhood that you will like if you get to know them. The difficult part is getting to know them.

For us it helps to meet people at church, while walking the dog, or just picking up the mail. Taking an agrarian friendliness into the city may not be intuitive - especially considering how suspicious most people are - but it can be done. It’s also quite remarkable how helpful friends can be in making city life bearable for a sympathetic agrarian like me.

My final agrarian help is to live in the natural world as much as possible. The life of a farmer is almost completely determined by the order of nature. Many of us living in cities, on the other hand, have practically cloistered ourselves completely from anything that isn’t manmade.

A farmer expects to get his hands dirty and knows that a harvest only comes after planning, much work, and the contributions of the Creator. The office troglodyte, however, is content to nourish his body with fast food. He is also more than happy to contract-out the yard work in order to have more time for TV.

A farmer rises with the chickens in order to avoid the heat of the day. The contemporary urbanite doesn’t even get to work until 9:00 and then stays up long after the sun has gone to sleep.

The farmer is also very much in tune to the seasons and to subtle changes in the weather. At the end of the year he knows it is the time to gather wood and then to cozy-up to the fire and let the slumbering world alone. The city dweller, on the other hand, runs from a heated house to a heated car to a heated office in the middle of winter. If she owns a coat, it’s more for fashion than for keeping warm. Who wants to be out in the cold anyway? Not even a blizzard can slow her down.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The truth is that even those of us living a city life can still respect the cycles and rhythms of nature. Perhaps the stars are dimmer in town but we can still plant a garden - even if its only a few potted plants in a window. We can turn off the TV and take a walk in the park. We can even vacation in a forested retreat instead of at an amusement park. It is possible for a sympathetic agrarian to find sustenance for the soul in a city despite the distractions of demos.

There are a lot of us living on earth these days. Most of us have no choice but to live in a city. Sometimes this is frustrating when we know that we prefer a quieter and less frenetic living space. Fortunately, all is not lost. The virtues that inhere naturally to rural communities do not by necessity have to be riven from the fabric of urban life. A bit more thoughtful work, neighborly kindness, and natural engagement are all opportunities still open to us. If they don’t present themselves to us naturally in our artificial environments, they are at least part of our human natures. With a bit more care they can still do us a lot of good.

Boys are not Girls

2010-01-22T17:20:00.000-08:00

A young man I know quite well - we’ll call him Casey - is a very talented gymnast and diver. When he was five years old he started doing rudimentary back flips off his mother’s organ. When he turned six, he started taking tumbling classes and his teacher soon discovered his abilities. Within a year Casey could climb the gym rope (without using his legs or feet) faster than any of the other students (of any age). In subsequent years, Casey would learn all of the men’s gymnastic events well. As a young teenager, he competed successfully in several state competitions. During one eventful meet at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Casey placed first in the state on rings - probably the most difficult of all the events. He had a bright athletic future to look forward to.

About a year later, just as Casey was starting his sophomore year in high school, his family moved to North Carolina. It was there he learned that there was no longer a future in men’s gymnastics in America. Casey couldn’t find a single gym anywhere with a men’s (boys) gymnastics program in the major metropolitan area where he lived. He practiced alone for a few months and then, sadly, gave it up. The problem he had run up against was Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. This (apparently appropriate) piece of legislation prohibits discrimination in any educational program receiving Federal financial assistance.

I understand if you’re confused by this. What do anti-discrimination laws have to do with men’s gymnastics, after all? Have men gymnasts been discriminating against minorities? Hardly. The problem comes down to something quite unexpected: misanthropic feminist activists and school budgets. It turns out that most schools have traditionally placed quite a bit more money into men’s sports than they have into women’s sports. This was a natural thing to do. Men’s sports have always had higher levels of participation and have drawn bigger crowds. Now this is all being interpreted as discrimination.

More damaging, however, is the attempt to use this difference in athletic participation as a tool in pushing forward a gender-neutralizing agenda. Men’s athletic programs should not be funded any more than women’s athletic programs these activists insist. If they are, lawsuits are threatened and institutions stand to lose all of their Federal grant money. Since nobody wants to give up their men’s football and basketball programs, other sports have to make up the difference. Men’s gymnastics is one of them.

For Casey this meant ending his gymnastics career many years before he wanted to. All was not lost, though. He joined his high school’s swim team and started diving. During both his junior and senior years he took first place in regional diving competitions. His training in gymnastics was serving him well - at least until he neared graduation. He then discovered that there was no use diving at the collegiate level. Title IX had taken away male scholarships for these events too. Casey’s future in competitive sports was over.

This is a sad story for those of us who know Casey. In fairness, I realize that similar sad stories must exist of frustrated women athletes who, prior to Title IX, were unable to fully develop their talents. The temptation is to ask for some kind of unbiased numerical comparison just to see how fair this whole thing really is.

Do women really want as many athletic scholarships as men do? I doubt it. It would seem much fairer to look at the total number of scholarships across disciplines (academic and athletic) if we’re really looking for equity. I am certainly not suggesting that we limit athletic opportunities for women who want them. But I am suggesting that we use better judgment in how we allocate resources.

Men are more physically competitive than women. This often turns out to be a problem for those men who haven’t learned how to express it appropriately. Most women, on the other hand, have a different perspective in potentially competitive situations because they are able to minimize confrontation. This has always been a feminine virtue. For men, virtue resides in mastering their competitive instincts not in pretending they don’t exist. Team sports, for instance, were originally promoted to help boys (and men) learn to channel their competitive instincts gallantly.

But this is not the main issue here. The bigger issue with the Title IX legislation is that we are letting gender-neutralizing advocates succeed in a campaign that is devastating boys. A big part of this campaign is the effort to minimize competitiveness.

There are very fundamental differences between men and women. This should be obvious. There are also important differences between boys and girls. And although most of these differences only become visible at puberty, differences at younger ages are also important. One of these differences that has been investigated quite a bit in recent years is Rough and Tumble (R&T) play.

Consider for a moment the research of Vivian Paley, a former kindergarten teacher in Chicago (Sommers, 2000). Vivian observed her young students in many settings and often noted the differences between boys and girls. When they would enter the “tumbling room” the boys would run and climb the entire time they are in the room, or until they “fall down dead” to rest momentarily. The girls, after several minutes of arranging one another’s shoes, concentrate on somersaults. Then they stretch out on the mats and watch the boys. When the girls are left alone in the tumbling room, they run and climb for a while and then lose interest, moving to other activities like painting and playing with dolls. Boys, she noticed, when left on their own never lost interest in tumbling.

Rough and tumble play also occurs in other animals. One of nature’s more endearing scenes is the unexpected discovery of baby animals tumbling around in mock combat with their siblings. We understand intuitively that they are having “fun”. In the last few generations we have also learned from researchers that this behavior helps prepare the young for more serious and life sustaining activities later in life. A wolf pup needs to know how to grapple with a sibling before it can bring down a deer. This also makes intuitive sense.

In recent years, however, it has become fashionable to limit the play time of children - especially the R&T play of boys. Some schools have eliminated playgrounds altogether. The underlying argument for this is that rough play in boys leads to aggressive and criminal behavior in men. Aggressive men, so the reasoning goes, must learn their delinquent behavior somewhere. Since we know that boys are more physically active than girls, it seems logical that an excess of activity, if not corrected, will lead to crime.

The trouble with this reasoning is that it is based on guesswork. In reality boys, just like puppies, learn how to be true to their natures by wrestling with each other. Researchers are learning that it is the boy left out of physical games that is the one more likely to develop behavioral (including criminal) problems later on.

Pam Jarvis (at Leeds Metropolitan University) wrote that R&T play “forms the basis for male socialization, in that boys who successfully engage in mock-fighting… are creating neuronal pathways that will later be developed in rule-based sporting activities and language-based competition, while those who are unable to group concepts of play fighting in early childhood are at risk of becoming less socially successful, more aggressive adolescents.”

Gender activists, on the other hand, argue that these play differences are not natural - that parents are responsible for teaching their children to behave this way. If this is how boys and girls act, it is because boys are picking up discriminatory habits from their fathers. Girls should be, according to this reasoning, just as active as boys, all things being equal.

One has to wonder what closet these activists have been living in. Did they never go outside during recess when they were young? I don’t mean to imply that rough boys don’t grow up to be criminals. A few of them do. I do mean that if we deny boys a healthy active place to grow up, we’ll be creating bigger problems than we thought we were solving. A typical healthy boy is a competitive boy. A typical healthy girl is noticeably less competitive. This is part of the natural order of things. If we ignore this – or worse, if we legislate policies based on this ignorance – we will certainly come to regret it.

We wouldn’t, for example, agree to give air conditioners to Eskimos because we give them to Navajos. Such “fairness” may be equitable in one sense but hardly fair in any meaningful sense. In contrast, we do give library cards to all kinds of people regardless of any differences among them. The poor are benefited just as the rich are. It comes as no surprise that because of this equality, libraries have been one of the most effective government-funded programs ever implemented.

So what kind of legislation is Title IX then? On the surface it looks like it might be fair. In reality it has turned out to be much less so. Policies that go against nature will never be truly fair. The reason things have gotten to this point is something that should concern us all a great deal: special interest groups have become much more effective interpreters of our laws than have people with common sense. In fact special interest groups have tried to force equality where it doesn't exist - against nature.

This is bad news for American boys, who are being steered (even manipulated), into a gender-less society and asked to fare however they can. Those of us who care about boys and girls need to be aware of this and take every opportunity we can to encourage young men to get involved with boy-friendly programs such as Boy Scouts, competitive sports, church groups, etc. - even as we encourage girls to be involved in girl-friendly programs of their own. We also need to better prepare ourselves legally against the special interest groups who are out to diminish boys. As odd as it might seem, we need to affirm the obvious fact that boys are not girls.

Works Cited

Jarvis, Pam. 2006. “Rough and Tumble” Play: Lessons in Life. Evolutionary Psychology 4:330-346.

Sommers, Christina. 2000. The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men. Simon & Schuster, New York and London.

Rethinking Chivalry for Boys

2010-01-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

A number of years ago, while living in Columbus, Ohio it was my habit to ride a city bus to and from The Ohio State University campus each day. My normal route took me through an area of frequent crime. Some of the passengers that boarded the bus there often looked menacing. Some of them looked downright scary.

On one occasion a couple of these characters seated themselves right behind me and for several minutes carried on the most colorful conversation imaginable. They seemed incapable of uttering a sentence without an expletive. Usually there was more than one - piled on top of each other in adjectival abandon. Often they were very graphically offensive. I was quite upset by it but didn’t, at first, dare to say anything.

In the seat in front of me was an elderly lady. I had not paid much attention to her at first but as I became more and more uncomfortable with the vulgarities behind me, I noticed that she was uncomfortable too. It was then that I realized I needed to do something. For some reason unknown to me then, I felt a responsibility to protect her.

I then ran through in my mind a couple of ways I might confront the offenders. In the end I just turned around and asked them in a friendly way if they wouldn’t mind toning their language down a bit. To my surprise they apologized and then got off the bus a couple of stops later. When my stop arrived and I got up to leave, the woman thanked me for what I had done. I remember stepping down from the bus onto the street feeling like I had done something significant - something morally empowering. Later I would come to realize that I was feeling chivalrous.

Chivalry is a medieval word. It brings to mind a warrior spirit and a protective instinct for those that are weak - particularly women and children. It reminds us of a time when chivalrous men protected ladies and fought in defense of Christ. These days it seems to be quite out of favor. This may seem odd at first. After all, who doesn’t know of a teenage girl that dreams of being a princess, live in a castle, and be courted by a brave and handsome knight? One can even argue that the simple act of opening a door for a woman is a small nod to the spirit of chivalry. And most women still appreciate the gesture. At church the other day a gentleman offered his seat to a young mother carrying her child. She graciously accepted it, and I was glad that some women still allow men to watch out for them. How then can chivalry – even a modern version of it – be out of favor?

The problem is that our society is becoming more and more reluctant to acknowledge that men might be stronger than women. We’re even uncomfortable acknowledging that women might have greater endurance than men. Unless a situation is “gender-neutral” we get a little nervous - at least in mixed company.

The case for a manly defense of Christian morality is even more unacceptable in public. The separation of church and state - a policy that we established to guarantee religious liberty in a Christian nation - has become a bludgeon that is used to enforce public agnosticism. A boy that presumes to be motivated by his faith to care for the “weaker sex” is unacceptable on two counts. He is much too public about his religion, and he seems all too condescending to women.

Another concern with Christian morality in its chivalrous form is that it is thought to lead ultimately to imperialism with its suppression of minorities. Some authors have even gone so far as to suggest that terrorism has its roots in chivalry. One can begin to see that bringing chivalry back into such a world would involve a good deal of resistance.

The word “chivalry” itself traces back through Middle English to the French “chevalier” and ultimately to the Latin word for horseman. In its English form, chivalry has a long association with knights and there is an immense romantic literature about them. One aspect of the medieval knight that is usually forgotten, though, is that the knight was originally part of a lower class of society. Often knights were servants. In English (and German) the term for horseman also carried with it a sense of a young lad on the verge of manhood (Braudy, page 66). This was because becoming a horseman implied a great deal of responsibility. A horse is a powerful animal and, unless it is well trained, is not something that a boy can handle by himself. A man on a horse, on the other hand, regardless of his status in society, is capable of going into battle. In fact, such a man becomes a powerful part of a battle.

As a chivalric symbol, the man on a horse represented power and the epitome of manhood. No doubt there were examples of this power being used for evil purposes. But these examples never became the norm in medieval society. Instead the power of the horseman / knight was encouraged to the degree that it assumed to role of defending virtue. In fact the combination, of this strength coupled with principle, is what virtue actually meant. The words “virtue” and “virile” come from the same root meaning manliness. The phrase “virtuous manliness” would have been considered redundant many generations ago. This is certainly no longer the case. Manliness today can mean a lot of things other than virtue. To understand why and how this change took place, though, requires a better understanding of what we mean by the word chivalry itself.

Many people think of a gentleman when they think of a modern example of chivalry. This is because of a history linking the two words that goes back to the time of Sir Walter Scott, and the revival of chivalry in 18th and 19th Century England. The trouble with linking these two words today, however, is that the meaning of “gentleman” is no longer the same as it used to be. To us a gentleman is a polite and considerate man with high standards. Perhaps he is of noble birth; or, conversely, he could be just any male person referred to in polite society. A couple of centuries ago a gentleman was much more than this.

One of the 19th Century’s most influential writers on chivalry was Kenelm Digby, author of The Broad Stone of Honour. Digby understood a gentleman to be a man with the qualities of chivalry which, to him, included: belief in God, generosity, high honor, independence, truthfulness, loyalty, hardihood, contempt for luxury, courtesy, modesty, humanity, and respect for women (see Girouard pp. 61-62).

Digby’s view of a gentleman was a bit grander than many of his time (or ours) felt comfortable with. He also had a penchant for hyperbole and, because of this, was often referred to as “silly”. Nonetheless, many serious writers were sympathetic to his ideals. Macaulay, Wordsworth, Ruskin and others all admitted that they liked reading his book.

What made The Broad Stone of Honour so popular was its placement of character above mere reason. This was a significant issue in the 19th Century, which saw the rise of Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism. Bentham abhorred emotional appeals and looked with suspicion on people with idealistic motivations. In many ways, the differences between traditional faiths and the so-called methodological atheism of our time are similar to these differences of the 19th Century. For the Utilitarian, the highest end to which a good society could aspire was the greatest contentment for the greatest number of people. If this meant sacrificing traditional values, then so be it. An evolving world needed to be ready to change, even its basic principles, if circumstances required it.

A good number of Englishmen, however, were not so sure. Many felt that truth, beauty and honor were worth defending. To them Digby’s call to chivalry was profoundly resonating. What also made it immediately useful was the direction it gave to young men. His very definition of chivalry addressed its relevance to boys directly:

“Chivalry is only a name for that general spirit or state of mind which disposes men to heroic and generous actions, and keeps them conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral world. It will be found that … this spirit generally prevails in youth than in the later periods of men’s lives; and, as the heroic is always the earliest age in the history of nations, so youth, the first period of human life, may be considered as the heroic or chivalrous age of each separate man …As long as there has been or shall be, young men to grow up to maturity, and until all youthful life shall be dead, and it’s source withered for ever, so long must there have been, and must there continue to be, the spirit of noble chivalry.”

This version of chivalry carried with it a contagious zeal that inspired a nation of young men with noble dreams. And, in fact, Digby‘s influence did not end with his generation. It has extended clear through the 20th Century into our own time in the organizations of the Boy Scouts. Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of scouting most likely read from Digby in his youth, “and certainly went to it for ideas when he was forming the Boy Scouts” (Girouard, page 64). In early scout handbooks, there were sections comparing knightly errantry to daily good deeds. Pictures of knights were also included to inspire boys to virtuous acts of service.

Today this image of a strong Christian man going to war sends mixed symbols. Sadly, religion itself has become a synonym to many people of intolerance - even the cause of all the evils of war. The most influential atheists of our time use this argument as one of their chief exhibits in “proving” that God does not exist.

Where then does chivalry have anything helpful to say in such a world? The answer should be: everywhere. At the very core of chivalry is the insistence that there are some things that need to be defended. A society that ignores this - or worse, a society that tries to hide this - will soon find itself precariously vulnerable to enemies without.

Men are programmed to be defenders. Boys that are becoming men are too. This willingness to fight if provoked is not just a cultural artifact of a troubled society as some people think. It is hardwired into a man’s psyche. And there is real danger if we think we can remove it when it becomes a social problem - as it often does when we no longer know what we should be fighting for.

Chivalry should be our response to an ever more violent and virtue-less world. I don’t mean by this that we take up arms and suddenly become belligerent. (I believe that at its core, chivalry is defensive and not offensive.) Neither do I mean that we ignore the Christian virtue of turning the other cheek. True chivalry, after all, is able to take abuse. I do mean that we as a society should begin to recognize and encourage the man who will stand up for what is right - staking his honor on it. I also mean that we should encourage boys to defend young women at all costs against anyone that would threaten their virtue. This requires, of course, that we raise boys with moral courage. It requires that they learn about their birthright - which is to become men of honor.

We can easily make too much out of chivalry. One doesn’t have to dig too far to find examples of its abuse or of those that have wandered from its ideal. Those who are against any kind of manliness at all tend to focus on these deviations. Certainly we don’t need belligerent Christians or more honor-saturated gangs. But boys still need to have dreams. Should they be content to wile away their youth wishing to be nothing more than computer game champions or paint ball warriors? Are there no virtuous ideals left to fight for?

Where is the church or school sensible and willing enough to admit a curriculum honoring the dreams of chivalry – at least those dreams that inspire a boy to become a virtuous man? Where are the stories of the modern knight-errant: of a young hero befriending an unpopular girl, of the man refusing to act dishonestly, of a burly teenager giving his coat to a child? It’s time we started giving these stories a bit more attention.

We have been trying for too long to fix a criminally violent world by destroying manliness. What we should have been doing all along – and what we desperately need to do now – is to prepare virtuous and manly men to fix the problem. We need to raise boys that have valiant dreams.

Works Cited

Braudy, Leo. 2003. From Chivalry to Terrorism. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

Digby, Kenelm Henry. 1846. The Broad Stone of Honour: or the True Sense and Practice of Chivalry. Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints.

Girouard, Mark. 1982. The Return to Camelot, Chivalry and the English Gentleman. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

One of Us

2009-12-21T18:54:00.000-08:00

Right after Jesus was born He was wrapped in a crude little piece of cloth and placed in a feeding trough. That is, He was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. Wise men at some time after his birth - maybe many weeks after - brought Him the ointments of kings. But at the time of He came into the world, Jesus lacked any kind of a regal reception. He came into the world surrounded by the sights, sounds and smells of farm animals.

For over two millennia we have been trying to understand what it means that the Creator of the world became like one of us. Christian orthodoxy accepts that He was born like a human baby, that he grew up like we do, and that He experienced the joys and the pains of mortality - only without committing sin. Nonetheless, according to this same orthodoxy, God was not transformed into a man, nor for that matter, was man changed into a god. It all seems a bit confusing. He is like us and yet he isn’t. Why did He come to earth this way in the first place? It leaves one wondering if we haven’t left something important out of the “official version.”

Fortunately at Christmastime we celebrate the birth of Christ as related in the gospels and not as indicated in the official creeds. If we stop and reflect on these remarkable verses, we can still somehow hear the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle. We can imagine the farmyard steam rising around the baby Jesus in His morning manger, and breathe in the rural pungency of a warming spring day in Bethlehem.

Perhaps Baby Jesus had a lock of curly black hair, a freckle on his chin, maybe even playful greenish brown eyes. He probably puckered His nose for a noisome fly. And if you tickled His feet with a piece of straw, He very likely curled His chubby little toes. It seems to me that if these stories were written for any reason at all, they were written to make one thing perfectly clear: Jesus is one of us.

This turns out to be a troubling thought if you don’t have a very good perception of human beings. In fact it almost verges on blasphemy. How could a divine being - even living without sin - become a mortal being and still be God? Even worse is the conclusion atheists draw from a very mortal Jesus: “of course he was mortal, what else did you expect?”

The question that needs to be asked is: where did we come up with this poor perception of human beings to begin with? For “Ye are Gods; and all of you are children of the most High” (Psalms 82:6.). if we start with the understanding that we are created in the image of God and that He insists on calling us His children (for the very obvious reason that He is our father) why should we wonder that our older brother Jesus Christ was born a human being just like us?

We have trained our minds for too long imagining that we can never understand the condescension of god (or call it the incarnation if you like). As a result, we have lost sight of our own potential. We have lost sight of who we really are.

The little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes is our brother, and He has made it possible to return home. If we haven’t figured this out yet, it’s time to think again about the true meaning of Christmas.