Entertaining Angels

Here's my latest contribution to the Sojourners blog, a reflection on a beggar I met in Paris 25 years ago, and on what that might mean for me today.

Here's an excerpt:

You just never know. There’s no way to know, just from looking at the sign. Maybe he was a con man, or maybe he was just my brother, genuinely in need of human contact to maintain his dignity. Or maybe he was even more than that. How does that passage go? “Some of you have entertained angels unawares.” 

You can read the rest of it here.

Camping With My Students: Stargazing in the Badlands

Around two in the morning I awoke to the song of coyotes.  I opened my eyes and looked up just in time to see a green meteor arc across the sky.  I was camping outdoors, with my students, in a remote corner of South Dakota.  Welcome to one of my favorite classrooms.

We set up tents, but we rarely use them.  Much nicer to sleep under the stars.

Each fall I look for an ideal weekend to take my Ancient and Medieval Philosophy students stargazing.  An ideal weekend counts as one where we will have clear skies, a new moon, and reasonably warm weather so we can spend a lot of time outside.

Several times over the last ten years, the weather's been so good that we've been able to go out to a primitive campground (i.e. one where there is no electricity and almost no urban glow) in the Badlands National Park. 

On such nights, in such places, the sky glistens with stars.  The Milky Way is a bright band across the night, and meteors punctuate our views each hour.

I tell my students that this is an optional trip.  They don't get credit for coming, and they don't lose any credit for staying home.  It's a four-hour drive from our campus, so it's a real commitment of time on their part.  Their only rewards are these: an experience of what the Norwegians call friluftsliv, a beautiful night under the stars in a remote and lovely place, and free pancakes at sunrise, cooked by me.

And yet every time I offer this trip, half a dozen or more students - and sometimes other professors - tag along. 

The stop sign is just a scratching post to this bison.

I've written before about the importance of teaching outdoors and of doing labs in philosophy.  Experientia docet, experience teaches us.  What we learn through lived, full-bodied experience tends to stick with us far better than what we simply hear spoken from a lectern or see on a PowerPoint slide.

We go out there, ostensibly, to see the stars.  This is because I want my students to watch the skies and to imagine what it would have been like for ancient and medieval philosophers like Thales, Plutarch, Ptolemy, Eratosthenes and, even Galileo (on the cusp of the Middle Ages) to gaze at the skies and learn from their movements.

But we are really there for other reasons that are easier to show than to tell. I want them to see that ideas do not grow up in a vacuum, and that the artificial divisions between academic disciplines are really artificial and convenient.  Educated people should care about all the disciplines.  We should not allow them to be compartmentalized, as though philosophy and sociology had nothing to do with accounting, or physics, or poetry.

Aristotle tells us that the love of wisdom begins in wonder.  I will add that experience of new things can be the beginning of wonder.

Many of my students have never heard coyotes sing.  In the Badlands, they trot past our cots and tents and sing to us all night long.  When we wake in the morning, we are often surrounded by small groups of bison, slowly grazing their way along the hillsides.  After breakfast we climb the steep slopes and find ancient fossils. 

I don't know if any of this is a desirable or assessable outcome for a philosophy class.  Also, I don't care.  Because all of these things are, I think, desirable outcomes for life. 

Because I believe that "it is beautiful to do so" is reason enough to sleep under the stars.

How To Write Term Papers

Some thoughts while grading essays:

1) Write simply.

2) Delete any unnecessary words that you don't need.

3) Use short words. This isn't the SAT or ACT vocabulary quiz, it's an essay.  Make it readable.  Don't try to wow anyone with big words.  Big words are a distraction in ordinary writing.  Save them for when you need them.

4) Write short sentences.  As your sentences increase in length, the number of things that can go wrong in the sentences increases.

5) Bad writing is like a food stain on your shirt. No matter how good your ideas, the stain and the errors will make the strongest impression.

6) Know your point, and make your case. If you don't have a point, you're not writing a paper; you're just writing words.  When you've got a point to make, state it plainly.  Then help others see why they might agree with you.

7) Avoid sweeping generalizations. Go ahead and be bold in your essays, by all means.  Try out strong ideas.  But be clear about exactly which ideas you are presenting, and why.  Avoid saying things like "since the beginning of time, this has been the case."  Rather, say "this has been the case at least since 1641 when Descartes published his Meditations." 

8) Edit. Then edit again. Don't think of proofreading as giving your writing a once-over before handing it in.  Read what you've written, then read it again and again.  Does each sentence lead into the next?  Does each paragraph follow smoothly from what came before it?  Is your opening line clear and compelling?

9) Love your reader.  Try to put yourself in your readers' shoes.   One helpful way to do this is to ask a friend to read your writing aloud to you.  Listen for where they stumble or hesitate.  Those are probably times where your writing is not clear.

10) Make writing a habit, not something you only do when you must.  Like any other skill, the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

*****

P.S. I've edited this post.  Even after you write something, go back and read it again and keep editing.  It's good exercise.

An Early Christian Philosopher on Civil Disobedience

"There is never an obligation to be obedient to orders which it would be pernicious to obey."

 -- St. Augustine, _Confessions_, I.vii. (Henry Chadwick trans.)

Socratic Pragmatism: On Our Attitude Towards Inquiry

"I do not insist that my argument is right in all other respects, but I would contend at all costs in both word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it."

Socrates, in Plato’s Meno, 86b-. G.M.A. Grube, trans.

Wendell Berry: Past A Certain Scale, There Is No Dissent From Technological Choice

“But past a certain scale, as C.S. Lewis wrote, the person who makes a technological choice does not choose for himself alone, but for others; past a certain scale he chooses for all others. If the effects are lasting enough, he chooses for the future. He makes, then, a choice that can neither be chosen against nor unchosen. Past a certain scale, there is no dissent from technological choice.”

-- Wendell Berry, “A Promise Made In Love, Awe, And Fear,” in Moral Ground: Ethical Action For A Planet In Peril. Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson, eds. (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2010) p. 388.

Interview on SD Public Radio

Karl Gehrke interviewed me on SD Public Radio today about my new book. We talk about the book, brook trout, fly-fishing, hunting, raising children, and a handful of other topics with occasional nods to Heidegger and Bugbee, Kathleen Dean Moore, Scott Russell Sanders, and, of course, Thoreau.

Click here to listen to the whole interview.

Giving Our Prayers Feet

The American scientist and philosopher Charles Peirce described belief as an idea you are prepared to act on.  If you say you believe something but you are not prepared to act on it, you probably don't really believe it in any meaningful sense of that word.

Of course, there might be a number of ways in which we might act on our beliefs.

What about prayer?  Could praying be a kind of action?

It depends.

Philosopher and atheist Daniel Dennett once described prayer as a waste of time.  I mean literally a waste of time.  If you're praying, he said, you're not engaged in useful activity.  When he was ill, someone offered to pray for him.  His reply:

Surely it does the world no harm if those who can honestly do so pray for me! No, I'm not at all sure about that. For one thing, if they really wanted to do something useful, they could devote their prayer time and energy to some pressing project that they can do something about.  (emphasis added)

I agree with him that if prayer keeps us from doing what we can to alleviate the suffering of the world, we're probably using our time poorly.

On the other hand, as I've argued before, prayer might be essential to other kinds of action.

Giving our money and time is generally a good thing, I think, but I think the giving becomes deeper still when we do as Thoreau urged in Walden: don't just give your money, but give yourself.  In other words, if you've begun by dumping water on your head for an ALS icebucket challenge, great.  Now deepen that giving by making it part of who you are.

If you decide to do that, prayer - or something like it, I don't care what you call it - can make a big difference.  Here's what I mean: giving to charities can be automated, so you can do it without thinking about it.  Set up an automatic bank transfer each month and you can give to as many charities as you can afford, without putting much of yourself in it.  But if you make those philanthropies and missions the intentional object of your thought for part of each day, you might find that you begin to care a lot more about the cause and the people involved.

If praying is the act of giving some of your time to bring together the world's greatest needs and your greatest hopes, then prayer might be the most important thing we can do.  Too often we allow ourselves to divorce others' needs from our hopes, and then the needs of others become allied with our fears. 

This is one reason why I respond to the news each day with prayer.  Sometimes my prayers are simply Kyrie eleison, "Lord, have mercy."  Because sometimes that's all I've got when my heart and mind are overwhelmed.  But if that's all I've got, then it will be my widow's mite, and I'll give it.  By the way, this has the added effect of making me worry less without taking away my desire to act for goodness and justice.

(My friend Anna Madsen has a short, funny, and helpful piece about just that, by the way.  Check it out here.)

All of this was inspired by a moving Facebook post by an alumnus of my college, Caleb Rupert.  Caleb is a thoughtful and creative man, and though I don't know him well, he strikes me as a good egg and as someone who wants to do the best he can in this life.  Here's what he shared on his page:

I'm standing at the bus stop and on the corner is a homeless woman. A kind looking black gentleman is walking by and nearly walks past her to beak the red-hand count down, 5, 4, 3....The gentleman stops, and turns to the homeless woman. He then falls to his knees and says a short prayer; I cannot hear the words, I'm too far away. As he finishes, she looks up and smiles at him. He smiles back and crosses the street. This gentleman gave up an entire two signals to acknowledge this woman through prayer. Though I do not believe that prayer will be heard by any entity other than the person praying and those around them, this does not discount the power, and importance, of acknowledgement of something as wicked as homelessness. A challenge in which so many of us like to ignore or pretend is non-existence, or worse, pretend this challenge is not as harsh and hard as it is. Regardless of my views of the validity of religion, I cannot ignore the importance of it being an entity which can cause those that follow, truly follow, not just "Sunday believers," but those that acknowledge the importance that every prophet and god-son has preached, which is to care for those that suffer and those that struggle. This gentleman, through his beliefs, gave this woman a smile, and the knowledge that when she goes to bed at night, someone is thinking about her and cares about her well being enough to stop and give his God, which he truly devotes himself to, a mention of her. In the end, regardless of a beliefs validity, what I believe is most important is relieving the pain of those that suffer and always remember that there is always someone who hurts more than you and your acknowledgement is the thing that can save them, even for a brief second, relief from that pain.  (Emphasis added)

Caleb's words remind me of Thoreau's, and of Dennett's, and of Jesus's.  Yeah, you read that right.  Because all four of them are concerned with making sure that whatever we do, we act on what we believe, and that we act in a way that tries to make others' lives better.     

I asked Caleb if I could share his words here.  His reply is just as good as his original post.  He said I could post his words, provided I include some links to local food shelves, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters.  I love that.

So I will ask that if you share this post, you do the same thing by posting a link to at least one organization in *your* community that helps the homeless.  In that way, let us make our prayers effective to the best of our ability, and may they rise to whatever heaven may be.

Here are my links for Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  Please consider volunteering your time, giving your money, and remembering them and the people they serve in your prayers.  And as you do so, may your prayers grow feet, and begin to change the world.

The Banquet

Union Gospel Mission

St Francis House