Fencing Bear at Prayer

Back in the Middle Ages--according to J.S. Mill--it was possible to be an individual. Not. Any. More. As Mill argued in his On Liberty   (1859): In sober truth, whatever homage may be professed, or even paid, to real or supposed mental superiority, the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendent power among mankind.  In ancient history, in the middle ages, and in a diminishing degree through the long transition from feudality to the present time, the individual was a power in himself; and if he had either great talents or a high social position, he was a considerable power.  At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses. Mill’s contemporary Jacob Burckhardt begged to disagree. Publishing h...

“I will tell you the tale of Tinúviel,” said Strider, “in brief--for it is a long tale of which the end is not known...” It was not the thing that I expected to find most difficult about doing Professor Peterson’s Self-Authoring Present: Virtues and Faults . Confessing my sins to the world? No problem! I have been doing that on this blog for nine years now, which is why I started after Easter with my Faults , to get warmed up. Plus, it seemed appropriate to do a confessional novena, having been newly confirmed as a Catholic. Writing about my Virtues after Pentecost was more challenging. I have a hard time seeing my strengths as strengths. I tend to want to change them into Faults so as not to feel like I am bragging. But writing stories to illustrate my Virtues and Vices? That should have been easy! Like a good Franciscan preacher, I know the value of exempla . Except, it seems, when it comes to my own life. I have spent my life “self-authoring” in one guise or another. The di...

Recommended reading! Read on... UPDATE as of April 30, 2018: The First Things  link has expired. Here was my original text. What has motivated you to study Mary as a scholar? I grew up in the Presbyterian church, which has no tradition of devotion to the Virgin Mary. I first encountered the medieval devotion to Mary through a course I took in college on women in the Middle Ages. At the time, I was also reading a good deal of feminist theology, which seemed to me at odds with the image of the Virgin that I encountered in the medieval sources. My goal as a scholar has been to recover an appreciation for the way in which medieval Christians prayed to Mary in the liturgy and imagined her through their reading of Scripture. Without Mary, I have become convinced, there can be no Christianity. I want to help modern Christians appreciate why Mary is necessary both theologically and devotionally to our understanding and experience of God. How do you teach college students ab...

Virtue : Love order and regularity Describe an experience : Please write a short story (approximately 1 ,000 characters) about a time in your life when this positive trait or virtue contributed to or created a situation that had a positive impact on your life. It is how I finished my second book this last year. Brief regular sessions of writing, no more than six or seven hours per day, and even that was pushing it. I know because I kept a record, clocking myself in and out every day. Ideally, I would have stopped at four hours a day, but last summer I was on fire. Only once or twice, however, did I push myself beyond seven hours in a day. For the most part I kept myself to five or six. I used a similar discipline to finish my dissertation (I have those time cards somewhere) and my first book. It was my dissertation advisor who gave me the idea of time cards. But it was Professor Boice’s advice about recovering from writer’s block that solidified the practice. Not everythin...

Virtue : Am comfortable alone Describe an experience : Please write a short story (approximately 1 ,000 characters) about a time in your life when this positive trait or virtue contributed to or created a situation that had a positive impact on your life. There’s a reason I find it hard to think in stories. Stories involve other people, and I spend most of my time alone. Not completely alone. Like a good medieval scholar, I have a dog, who sleeps while I’m reading or writing, barks at every hint of intrusion, and is ecstatically happy to go outside and chase the squirrels in our backyard while I watch Jordan Peterson videos on my iPad. But mostly I am alone, except when I take my dog for a walk or, during term, when I have to teach. I have spent whole years of my life almost completely alone. The years I was working on my dissertation. The years I was working on my second book . (While I was working on my first book , I had a year--nine months--at the National Humanities Ce...

Virtue : Have a lot of insight into myself and others Describe an experience : Please write a short story (approximately 1 ,000 characters) about a time in your life when this positive trait or virtue contributed to or created a situation that had a positive impact on your life. I know what you’re thinking. Actually, quite often, I do. Not because I am good at reading minds. Looking at people, I more often than not see them as terrifyingly opaque. But then I say something that seems true to me, and they respond: “I’ve thought that, too.” It happens regularly now with readers of my blog. I confess something that feels embarrassingly personal, and they write me: “Thank you for expressing what I have often felt, but could not put into words.” It makes me wonder who this “I” is that I keep writing about. Professor Peterson was talking recently (at least, in my listening history) about the reasons that the Logos had to become incarnate in the person Jesus of Nazareth. (I think...