Author: Andrew Sullivan

Hal Lasko, also known as “Grandpa,” is a 97-year-old graphic artist whose computer creations look “like a collision of pointillism and 8-bit art.” The above short film, The Pixel Painter, documents his process. Christopher Jobson provides background:

Lasko, who is legally blind, served in WWII drafting directional and weather maps for bombing raids and later worked as a typographer (back when everything is done by hand) for clients such as General Tire, Goodyear and The Cleveland Browns before retiring in the 1970s. Decades after his retirement his family introduced him to Microsoft Paint and he never looked back. Approaching a century in age, Lasko is now having his work shown for the first time in an art exhibition and also has prints for sale online.

Karen Swallow Prior hopes that animal welfare makes a comeback in Christian communites:

Many Christians accept or ignore the wide-scale suffering of animals under the justification of scientific “progress” or cheap meat (as a meat-eater, I include myself here). This perspective, though, reflects the influence of a modernist worldview more than biblical thinking. After all, it wasn’t the Bible but rather the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, who helped popularize the idea that animals are mere machines to be put to human service. “Here is my library, from which I take my wisdom,” Descartes told an observer as he dissected a calf. Descartes’ disciples are said to have kicked their dogs and laughed to hear the “creaking of the machine.”

In contrast, while the Bible mandates humans in Genesis 1:28 to rule over animals, other passages make clear that we are to do so with kindness: the Scriptures tell us not to muzzle the ox while it treads the grain and that the righteous one has regard for the life of his beast.

More biblical thinkers than Descartes and his disciples have also taught compassion toward animals. John Calvin said that we are to “handle gently” the animals God placed under our subjection. John Wesley proclaimed in his sermon “The General Deliverance” that the animal kingdom is included in God’s salvation. William Wilberforce, Hannah More, and other 19th-century abolitionists included animal welfare in the reforms they succeeded in bringing to Great Britain.

“[T]he criminals produced by medieval Islam seem to have been especially resourceful and ingenious,” writes Mike Dash of the loose association of rogues known as Banu Sasan:

Who were they, then, these criminals of Islam’s golden age? The majority, [historian Clifford] Bosworth says, seem to have been tricksters of one sort or another,

who used the Islamic religion as a cloak for their predatory ways, well aware that the purse-strings of the faithful could easily be loosed by the eloquence of the man who claims to be an ascetic or or mystic, or a worker of miracles and wonders, to be selling relics of the Muslim martyrs and holy men, or to have undergone a spectacular conversion from the purblindness of Christianity or Judaism to the clear light of the faith of Muhammad.

Amira Bennison identifies several adaptable rogues of this type, who could “tell Christian, Jewish or Muslim tales depending on their audience, often aided by an assistant in the audience who would ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ at the right moments and collect contributions in return for a share of the profits,” and who thought nothing of singing the praises of both Ali and Abu Bakr—men whose memories were sacred to the Shia and the Sunni sects, respectively. Some members of this group would eventually adopt more legitimate professions—representatives of the Banu Sasan were among the first and greatest promoters of printing in the Islamic world—but for most, their way of life was something they took pride in.  …

Ultimately, however, what strikes one most about the Banu Sasan is their remarkable inclusiveness. At one extreme lie the men of violence; another of Bosworth’s sources, ar-Raghib al-Isfahani, lists five separate categories of thug, from the housebreaker to out-and-out killers such as the sahib ba’j, the “disemboweler and ripper-open of bellies,” and the sahib radkh, the “crusher and pounder” who accompanies lone travelers on their journeys and then, when his victim has prostrated himself in prayer, “creeps up and hits him simultaneously over the head with two smooth stones.” At the other lie the poets, among them the mysterious Al-Ukbari—of whom we are told little more than that he was “the poet of rogues, their elegant exponent and the wittiest of them all.”

(Image: manuscript dated 1200CE, via Wikimedia Commons)

Reviewing N.T. Wright’s Virtue Reborn, Will McDavid questions whether virtue can be “learned” in Christianity:

Do we ever change for the better? Become more virtuous? Certainly, but it is always under the sign of struggle, of the Cross. Augustine’s memoir of his life’s journey, Flaubert’s St. Julian, Tolstoy’s Father Sergius, Dostoevsky’s Idiot or Dmitri, Shakespeare’s penitent Lear, the innumerable testimonies of Alcoholics Anonymous – the religious world is full of true examples of positive virtue, but only as the fruit of guilt and grace, suffering and realized limitation and confession and repentance and chest-beating and those rare, incoercible moments of knowing you are known and loved, sinner and righteous, fallen and redeemed.

As the love of Christ is the starting-point, so it is also the end. Virtue itself is good, but virtue development is self-conscious and therefore disingenuous. Like Daphne, it turns still and lifeless the moment you try to grasp it. In practice, focusing on your own ‘character’ tends to undermine the realities of bound wills and spiritual frustrations that must always be the starting points of grace. And though virtue may persist into the new creation, but there is only one that Christ himself says will not be taken away: the “one needful thing” (Lk 10:42) – to know oneself to be justified and loved as sinner by God himself and, God-willing, to “see his face.”

Noting this week’s anniversy of the Scopes trial – often portrayed as a seminal contest between religion and science – Yair Rosenberg points out that key religious authorities supported the pro-evolution side and served as experts for the defense:

[Louis] Ginzberg [who helped Scopes’ defender Clarence Darrow brush up on scripture]  was not the only rabbi to make his mark at the Scopes trial. Herman Rosenwasser, a Hungarian-born Reform rabbi, actually traveled to Dayton for the proceedings. Though uninvited, he so impressed the defense team that the ACLU’s lawyer Arthur Hays delivered the rabbi’s argument–that the Hebrew text of Genesis, properly translated, in fact supported the evolutionary narrative–in court. (You can see Rosenwasser giving Hebrew instruction to the defense attorneys in this photo.)

In fact, Ginzberg and Rosenwasser were only a subset of the religious figures who supported the pro-evolution side of the Scopes case–a group which included liberal theologian Charles Francis Potter, and many of the scientists who submitted written testimony on Scopes’s behalf, like Harvard’s Kirtley Mather. These individuals were systematically scrubbed from depictions like “Inherit the Wind” to give the impression that the trial was a simple showdown between science and faith. But as Louis Ginzberg and his comrades remind us, many religious people have never perceived the two realms to be in conflict.

Stephen Mattson suggests that modern day believers revisit the idea of apology:

Despite vast Biblical support requiring followers of Christ to apologize, historically, Christians have been guilty of using “forgiveness” as a pseudo-weapon to point out the sins of others. Forgive the gays, the abortionists, the liberals, the Communists, and the Muslims! Spiritual leaders have manipulated “Christian forgiveness” into a subtle way of pointing out the faults of those we disagree with. They’re sinners. They’re guilty. They’re ignorant. They’re wrong.  …

Christians mistakenly believe that apologizing discredits everything they’ve ever said. As if saying “we’re sorry” will somehow negate the fact that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead. In reality, apologizing promotes honesty, transparency, authenticity, and humility — things all Christians should exhibit throughout their lives. When Christians apologize, it adds integrity and legitimacy to their words and actions.

“I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a ‘hypaethral book,’ such as Thoreau talked about – a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine – which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes,” – Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation” in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community

(Photo by Flickr user tribp.)

Millman considers the challenges they face:

In my experience, only a very small minority of people in any religious tradition truly affirm that religion’s teachings intellectually, and most of the world’s religions aren’t organized around creedal affirmation anyhow. For the overwhelmingly majority of people, they want to be able to live with their church – to experience life cradled within its arms – not to think with it.

The trouble for the minority who actually care about thinking is that they may also care about that experience of living within a religious tradition and community. Then they have a choice: of learning to “think with” that tradition, and turn the mind away from doubt (which has, I would argue, deleterious consequences for the health of one’s mind); or of becoming the kind of theological liberal who isn’t terribly committed to a particular truth (which has, I would argue, deleterious consequences for one’s ability to truly feel religious experience); or of becoming a secret dissenter (which has, I would argue, deleterious consequences for one’s relationships with one’s fellow communicants); or of becoming a public dissenter (which makes one a trouble-maker with all kinds of deleterious consequences).