Fire and Knowledge

A visitor from the ‘50s would not recognize the modern no-collar workplace, with its casual dress codes and flexible work hours, designed to reflect the ebb and flow of creative ideas. The whole thing is like a hippie commune under professional management.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 202.

We’ve had HTML and websites for over a decade now, isn’t it about time we can start using tabs? There’s still no easy way to do this with HTML, which is why most websites have a space between each paragraph instead of a tab. There’s something backwards here. Let’s get a &tab;!

It has been estimated that there are at least four times as many abandoned housing units in New York City as there are homeless people living on the streets there. Homelessness is not due to a physical scarcity of housing but to a price-related shortage, which is painfully real nonetheless. Such inefficiency in the allocation of resources means that people are sleeping outdoors on the pavement on cold winter nights—some dying of exposure—while the means of housing them already exist, but are not being used because of laws designed to make housing “affordable.”

–Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 45-6.

Sitting in a quiet downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there’s more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book.

Yes, the whole thing.

“It was great,” said the peculiar Indiana native, who, despite owning a television set and having an active social life, read every single page of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee….

Even more bizarre, Meyer is believed to have done most of his reading during his spare time—time when the outwardly healthy and stable resident could have literally been doing anything else, be it aimlessly surfing the Internet, taking a nap, or simply just staring at his bedroom wall.

“It’d be nice to read it again at some point,” Meyer continued, as if that were a perfectly natural thing to say.

–The Onion, “Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book,” January 19, 2008.

You cannot lose your land and remain free; if you keep your land, you cannot be enslaved.

–Wendell Berry, “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 45.

I recently read yet another Christian complaint about Harry Potter. The critic’s thesis was that Joanna Rowling is a “contemporary transgressive artist par excellence,” who holds lightly to the canons of Judeo-Christian morality and of traditional children’s literature in the west, the Potter tales being a catalog of rule-breaking, disobedience, lying, vengeance-taking, and whatnot, its final installation containing the revelation of the Snape-Dumbledore murder-suicide pact that insinuates euthanasia into the minds of children–not to mention that all of this is done in a pagan context by witches and wizards, no less.

My reaction was–yes–but did he miss something? Like the Point of it All?

One wonders just what kind of literature a person like this can read…. Christians are apparently supposed to be people for whom everything is a monochromatic moral tale, and who operate on the maxim that people are what they read. But this is only true of fools, and one cannot account for the actions or opinions of fools.

–S. M. Hutchens, “The Helpful Discovery of Dirt in Potter’s Field“

Greg Boyd, Christian pastor and author, responds to Huckabee’s desire to “amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards”:

Marriage throughout most of the book of “God’s standards” allowed for polygamy and even concubines. If the Bible is to be our standard for marriage in America, perhaps our constitution should be amended to reflect its comprehensive view of marriage.

So too, the Bible allows for (and even occasionally commands) slavery, as the good old pre-abolition Christian South was eager to point out to the liberal secularists in the North. Would Huckabee have us amend our constitution to fit this aspect of the book of “God’s standards”? Why not? If our goal is to conform to “God’s standards,” why be selective?

How about the way women are treated as property throughout much of the Bible? And let’s not forget the pervasive “holy wars” we find in the Old Testament. If we want a constitution that truly reflects “God’s standards,” why not incorporate these as well?….

[Christians] may want a constitution that “conforms to God’s standards,” but only certain passages carefully selected out of his book of holy “standards,” and certainly not the standards set by Jesus Christ!

Isn’t it ironic?

Read the whole thing.

Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn’t have before. Not two thoughts, or five—just one.

–William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 53.