My six-year-old daughter told me that she is old enough now for her own laptop. I explained that we didn’t even have computers when I was growing up. “Wow,” she replied. “So how did you send your emails?”
Halden has posted a brief review of Kim’s new book of propositions – and if you’re looking for Christmas ideas, I notice the book is now 28% less at Amazon…
Here’s another quote from Mike Higton’s delightful preface: “Proposition by proposition, aphorism by aphorism, this book provides a solid training in how to think theologically – how to break and remake your thought in the light of God’s grace…. Think of each proposition as a hammer blow – and realize that you would do well to pause after each, just to check whether anything is broken.”
Next year’s conference on Trinitarian Theology after Barth is now open for registration. The conference will take place in the lovely city of Auckland, 14-15 May 2009. Speakers will include Bruce McCormack, Paul Molnar, John McDowell, Ivor Davidson, Murray Rae, and several others (including myself).
You can get a registration form by contacting Myk Habets.
“I had elected then [in my early student years] to pursue no career. To put it theologically, I died to the idea of career and to the whole typical array of mundane calculations, grandiose goals and appropriate schemes to reach them…. I do not say this haughtily; this was an aspect of my conversion to the gospel….
“[Later] my renunciation of ambition in favor of vocation became resolute; I suppose some would think, eccentric. When I began law studies, I consider that I had few, if any, romantic illusions about becoming a lawyer, and I most certainly did not indulge any fantasies that God had called me, by some specific instruction, to be an attorney or, for that matter, to be a member of any profession or any occupation. I had come to understand the meaning of vocation more simply and quite differently.
“I believed then, as I do now, that I am called in the Word of God … to the vocation of being human, nothing more and nothing less…. Within the scope of the calling to be merely but truly human, any work, including that of any profession, can be rendered a sacrament of that vocation. On the other hand, no profession, discipline or employment, as such, is a vocation.”
—William Stringfellow, A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow (Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 30-31.
I was sad to hear that William Placher died this week, aged 60. There are reports here, here and here. Placher was an important Reformed theologian and a leading representative of Yale-school “postliberal” theology. He once said: “The way we best show our love to the whole world is to love with a particular passion some little part of it.”
A guest-post by Scott Stephens (originally written for an Australian newspaper)
Conservative politics is now everywhere in retreat. Or rather, it has been routed. Across the Western world, conservative parties are in disarray after suffering a catastrophic series of electoral defeats. Just think of the fate of the Liberal Party after 
Howard, or the Republicans after Bush, or New Labor in these final, dying gasps of the Blair-Brown regime (which has been overtly Thatcherite in its approach to economic policy).
Conservatism’s now dismal outlook is due, in large part, to the rather fickle affections of the free-market economy to which it has wedded itself. Even during the bad times, it finds itself in a position where it has to keep talking up the benefits of capitalism for fear of losing its political pedigree – that of being the best at managing the economy and generating massive surpluses.
But while political conservatism is everywhere being rolled back, many commentators and even economists find themselves looking to the likes of President-elect Obama for a different kind of conservatism: domestic or economic (in the traditional Greek sense of oikonomia, or ‘household management’) conservatism. Take Chris Patten, former Tory and now Chancellor of Oxford University, who has recently written that ‘the new president’s first task will be … to restore the real family values of saving, thrift, responsibility, and fair reward.’ Fareed Zakaria has expressed the same sentiment. ‘This crisis – dramatically, vengefully – forced the United States to confront the bad habits it has developed over the past few decades. If we can kick those habits, today’s pain will translate into gains in the long run.’
In other words, the new conservative hope is that the current credit contraction will force people to begin living within reasonable means once again, and thus will begin rectifying nearly three decades of fiscal insanity. The figures that measure the extent of our madness over this period are truly terrifying. In the United States, the ratio of private debt to income is 290%. In Australia, it is 165%. Admittedly, these ratios include people’s mortgages. But far from ameliorating these figures, it is the mortgages themselves that prove to be the problem.
One of the most notable trends over the past decade – on the back of the dramatic escalation in home equity due to the housing bubble – is people’s willingness to convert their mortgages into yet another line of credit for spending on luxury items and retail. And so, while under relatively normal economic conditions, the escalating prices of certain staples like food and fuel and clothing would cause a downturn in domestic economic growth, and thus a slowing in the retail sector, in the United States and Australia ‘consumer confidence’ and retail spending has gone through the roof!
And this brings us to perhaps the most obscene political decision made by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in his first year in office. Rudd inherited a $17.3 billion budget surplus from the Howard-Costello decade, a surplus that already had been amassed by paying down public debt (and thus ignoring social infrastructure) and by converting public debt into private or household debt, which now exceeds $150 billion.
In order to bolster his credentials as an ‘economic conservative’, Rudd-Swan then presented the Australian public with $21.7 billion budget surplus for the 2008-2009 financial year – again, money that could have been invested toward the future in the form of infrastructure, schools, universities, clean energy, and research and development, or money that could even have been used to honour our commitment to the UN’s Millenium Goals!
But instead, at the first sign of a drop in consumer confidence and a slackening off of retail-mania in September, the Federal Government promised to pump $10.4 billion into the pockets of the Australian public at a time of the year when they are guaranteed to spend up big and not pay down debt. Merry Christmas, indeed!
But before you spend it up and thus deepen our present addiction to an unsustainable and self-centred way of life, try reflecting on how we got here. Think, just for a moment, about having yourselves a conservative Christmas, in which we decide that we probably have spent more than enough on tat and trinkets, on leisure and gadgets, most often to the neglect of the common good and our moral obligation to care for one another. And think about what it says about our government, that at the very time when we should begin reshaping our habits and practices, orienting them toward others and toward the future, we are given just what we need to deepen our addiction to unrestrained spending.
Wendell Berry put it beautifully when he lamented that, in the United States, ‘the most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.’
The last President to do that was Jimmy Carter, just before he was voted out of office in a landslide. His replacement? Ronald Reagan. And there began our present malaise.
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