Monthly Archives: February 2020

This indirect approach didnt work well. We gave our bankers and business people greater freedom from government regulation, but they abused our trust. The lenience of regulators has seen business become remarkably lawless. Too much of the extra income the economy has generated has gone to the very highest income-earners, leaving too little going to middle and lower income-earners.

This era of economic rationalism and microeconomic reform has ended, leaving Scott Morrison with much damage to clean up. Meanwhile, many voters are disillusioned and distrustful of both main parties, and are turning elsewhere to populists such as Pauline Hanson, who not only have no answers to the problems that bother us, but also seek our support by blaming our troubles on unpopular scapegoats Muslims, city-slickers etc.

The economic rationalists solution to misbehaving businesses, caveat emptor let the buyer beware is good advice but, in the modern complex world, its impractical. There arent enough leisure hours in the day for us to spend most of them checking that all the businesses we deal with arent overcharging us or taking advantage of us in some way, and our employer isnt underpaying us.

So why dont governments cut to the chase and simply make treating us in such ways illegal? And when doing so is already illegal as it usually is why dont they resume adequately policing those laws?

Something almost everyone craves in their lives, but politicians and economists long ago lost sight of, is a high degree of security. We want the security of owning our own homes and we want security in our employment.

And yet weve allowed home ownership to become unaffordable to an increasing proportion of young people. Why? Because weve put the interests of existing home owners ahead of would-be home owners. We could fix the unaffordability problem if we were prepared to put the interests of the young ahead of the old.

Some degree of flexibility in the job market is a good thing provided it works both ways. Under economic rationalism, the goal was more flexibility for employers without any concern about what this did to the lives of casual workers mucked about by selfish and capricious employers.Its good that part-time jobs are now available for those who want one students, parents of young children, the semi-retired but we could do more to make part-time jobs permanent rather than casual.

Many young people worry that were moving to a gig economy in which most jobs are non-jobs: short-lived, for only a few hours a week and badly paid, with few if any benefits.

I dont believe we are moving to such a dystopia, mainly because I doubt it would suit most employers interests to treat most of their employees so shabbily. But, in any case, the way to avoid such a world is obvious: governments should make it illegal to employ people on such an unacceptable basis.

And governments will do that as soon as its the case that not to do so would cost them too many votes. That is, we have to make democracy work for the masses, not just the rich and powerful.Of course, the security many of us would like is to live in a world where nothing changes. Sorry, not possible. Economies, and the mix of industries within them, have always changed and always will often for reasons that, though they disrupt the lives of some people, end up making most of us better off.

New technologies are a major source of disruptive, but usually beneficial, change. Another source of disruptive change is the realisation that certain activities are bad for our health (smoking, for instance) or for the natural environment (excessive irrigation and land clearing, burning fossil fuels) and must be curtailed.

Adversely affected interest groups will always tempt governments to try to resist such change at the ultimate expense of the rest of us. The right answer usually is for change to go ahead, but for governments to help the adversely affected adjust. Just what we havent been doing.

Ross Gittins is the Heralds economics editor.

Ross Gittins is the Economics Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.

Excerpt from:

Our economy doesn't work for the common good - The Sydney Morning Herald

History and Eschatology:Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theologyby n. t. wrightbaylor, 365 pages, $34.95

In the broadest sense, natural theology attempts to describe God and his relation to the world by attending to nature or natural revelation, without taking special revelation or supernatural truth into consideration. For several centuries, natural theology has ignored historyspecifically the history of Jesus. So argues N. T. Wright in his Gifford Lectures, published by Baylor Press as History and Eschatology. Wright proposes to fill this gap. Even on the premises of natural theology, Jesus deserves a place. Jesus and the church he founded, after all, exist within the natural world. Natural theology can and should be evangelized.

Wright blames the truncated state of natural theology on the modern revival of Epicureanism. Epicureanism is popularly known as a hedonist philosophy of Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. But the Epicurean lifestyle is founded on a metaphysics and physics that proved attractive to secularizing elites in the early modern period. God or gods may exist in an Epicurean universe, but he or they are too distant and indifferent to be relevant to us. Religion offers private comfort, but the enlightened know its merely a human invention to pacify the masses. Epicureanism is materialist atomism; the world hums along on its own steam as atoms combine, separate, and recombine. Death is the end, so theres nothing to worry about.

On Wrights account, Epicureanism splits reality and human experience. It forces us to choose between a godless world and a worldless god. The supernatural, if it exists at all, occupies a realm apart from nature. Orthodox Christians often unwittingly accept this dualistic framework, clinging to the supernatural and to faith but skirting the risky task of understanding history and the natural world. Gotthold Lessing spoke of a great ugly ditch between the contingent truths of history and the necessary truths of reason. Secularists settled comfortably on the history side of the ditch, the orthodox on the other.

Wright has long described himself as an historian rather than as a theologian. He has been criticized for constructing a historical Jesus behind the Jesus of the Gospels, a fifth Gospel to measure the canonical four. In History and Eschatology, he dismisses the charge, claiming he only aims to understand the canonical sources more accurately and deeply. More broadly, Wrights goal is to formulate a non-Epicurean mode of historical study and historical writing. He rejects rationalism in favor of a critically realist epistemology in which love is the primary posture of knowing. Taking up his task of historian, hes open to the possibility that, by using the tools of historical investigation, we can study real-world events as signs of heavens presence and power.

An Epicurean framework inevitably distorts the ancient Jewish and biblical view that heaven and earth overlap. In the temple, heaven takes an earthly address. Sabbath is a temple of time, when we may taste the future day of Gods eternal rest. As images of God, human beings mediate between heaven and earth. God works through us to spread his order and wisdom in the world and to construct a cosmic temple where glory dwells.

Modern Christians have abandoned this worldview, and so have replaced the biblical hope for new creation with what Wright calls a Platonic hope for heaven. A similar error led Albert Schweitzer to conclude Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who expected the end of the world and died in despair when it didnt happen. (Wright cleverly suggests that Schweitzer picked up his obsession with the end not from patient study of ancient sources but from the collapse of Valhalla in Wagners Ring cycle.) Much modern scholarship explains the New Testament and early church as a massive adjustment to unrealized hope. The mythology here, Wright rightly argues, is entirely that of modern scholarship. No ancient Jews expected the end of the world in the sense Schweitzer suggested. Jesus hoped for and prophesied the end of a disjointed world order, not the end of the space-time universe. Schweitzers eschatological mistake has massive implications for natural theology. If Jesus expected the end of nature, he wont have much to say about nature.

What happens when Jesus is reintegrated into natural theology? Wright sketches a natural theology by expounding on seven universal human aspirations: justice, beauty, truth, power, freedom, spirituality, relationships. Each stands under a paradox. We know, for instance, that justice and beauty are necessary to a fully realized human life, but we also know justice is partial and beauty is broken. All seven signposts, Wright suggests, converge on Jesuss cross, the broken signpost to which all other broken signposts point.

Yet Christians confess a meta-paradox: This broken signpost is where God reveals himself, where heaven is present on earth. Here God suffers the ultimate injustice, his beauty effaced. Here the God who is love is crushed by brute force. Here Truth is drowned out by Pilates scoffing question and the shouts of the mob. Because Jesus rose from the dead, though, this broken signpost becomes the source of universal renewal: fresh springs of justice, new depths of beauty, a kind of powerless power, a freedom that isnt limited by chains or imprisonment, a social body of mutual edification. New creation emerges out of the cross and resurrection of Jesus, as the ordinary lives of ordinary followers of Jesus become a natural revelation of the presence and power of God.

The churchs confession is contestable and contested, and Wright wont permit a retreat into fideism. Once we refuse to foreclose the possibility of resurrection and new creation from the outset, we can treat Jesus, the cross, the resurrection, Pentecost, and the churchs history as historical phenomena, subject to historical investigation and confirmation. Jesus the rejected stone becomes the chief cornerstone of a renewed natural theology.

Wrights wide-ranging book is primarily about the two topics of his title, history and eschatology. On both, his central arguments are convincing. Natural theology should attend to history, and since Jesus is a historical figure, it needs to attend to him. Wright is also correct that New Testament eschatology is about the renovation, not the removal, of creation. Jesus, Wright knows, shakes natural theologians, and every other sort of theologian, out of our slumbers. Once we admit the Gospels into the historical record and really grasp Jesuss apocalyptic prophecies, well see more than weve dreamt of, a strange world where the sky cracks, veils tear, and gravestones roll away.

Peter J. Leithart is President ofTheopolis Institute.

Continued here:

Heaven in History | Peter J. Leithart - First Things

Welcome to Elements of Story, a biweekly column about narrative tropes, what they mean, and why they just wont go away.

For the inaugural installment of Elements of Story, and just in time for Valentines day, Im going to dissect an archetype that has been causing a stir and setting hearts aflutter for centuries: the Byronic hero.

Definitions of the Byronic hero vary by source, but the basic gist is that hes an arrogant yet emotionally sensitive rebel who rages against societal norms, is usually haunted by a dark and mysterious past, and has been a staple of romantic storylines for hundreds of years. You could literally write a book about the history of the Byronic Heroindeed, multiple people already haveso for the sake of concision and also my continued sanity, were going to investigate the Byronic hero through the specific example of one of his most recent appearances: Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).

Ever since The Force Awakens first premiered, Darth Vaders grandson and #1 fan has been a point of contention within the Star Wars fandom, particularly with regards to his dynamic with protagonist Rey (Daisy Ridley). While things have calmed down somewhat following the underwhelming finale that was The Rise of Skywalker, if you want to start a fight online about a galaxy far, far away, mention Reylo and see what happens.

One of the most genuinely befuddling things about the discourse surrounding Reylo is the frequently held opinion that its allure is anyway inexplicable or unforeseeable. Similarly, the common, lazy narrative that its popularity can be explained away as Adam Drivers thirst-club projecting their desire onto the Star Wars universe reeks of ignorance. Whether borne of conscious intent or sheer coincidence, Kylo Ren is a villain who also fits a centuries-old romantic archetype like a glove in ways that are hinted towards in The Force Awakens and laid increasingly bare in each subsequent installment. That some viewers picked up on the Byronic subtext early while others did not simply speaks to the variance in media consumption habits and tastes between audience members. If youre familiar with an archetype, youre going to spot its likeness, and view said likeness through the lens of the implications baked in with that lineage. If youre not, you wont.

So, who is this Byronic Hero guy, anyway? Well, the tl;dr version is that hes basically Satan and his origins predate Lord Byron by at least a few hundred years.

In truth, the Byronic Hero is so old that tracing his origins gets quite speculative. Theres not a singular definitive answer so much as a collection of theories. To give a relatively cohesive explanation of who this guy is and how he got here without writing a novel, Im going to things down into two key questions:

To address the first question, lets start by talking about the Devil. Im not going to say that John Milton was the first storyteller to make Satan cool, but he sure did make such a characterization mainstream with Paradise Lost. The most beautiful of Gods angels, Lucifer chafes at Gods omnipotence, convinces a number of his brethren to join him in a rebellion that ultimately fails, is banished to Hell and eternally damned, but stubbornly stands by his choices because, better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven. Miltons Satan was, to use modern parlance, a beautiful trash firea handsome, passionate dreamer whose quick-tempered fervor proves self-destructive in spite of his considerable intellect. He is, in other words, smart enough to know that his hubris will be his downfall, but too in thrall to his passions for that knowledge to save himself from such a fate. He is a tragic hero as defined by Aristotle, an inherently sympathetic figure not as much in spite of his flaws as because of them.

Lets stop for a second so I can convince you Kylo Ren fits this pattern, in case you arent convinced already. With his journey from Ben too much Vader in him Solo to Kylo Ren, his rejection of his heritage and violent rebellion against Luke Skywalker, he follows the same basic trajectory of Miltons Lucifer. And as far as personality is concerned, Ben didnt gel well with the there is no passion Jedi code, and unlike Anakin Skywalker, it didnt even take the development of a particular relationship for things to reach a breaking point.

Now, as far as how Satan became a romantic figure, we need to make a stopover with the Romantics because the journey from Romantic to romantic is really just semantics. Romanticism was a prominent intellectual and artistic movement in Western culture that took place in the late 18th and 19th centuries and encompassed everything from literature and painting to architecture and music. It emphasized emotion, spontaneity, irrationality, and the individual with a particular focus on subjectivity, and is generally regarded as a reactionary movementa rebuttal against the rationalism that defined the Enlightenment.

Romantics loved Miltons Satan. My favorite hero, Miltons Satan, Robert Burns gushed, lauding Satans intrepid, unyielding independence, desperate daring, and noble defiance of hardship. That Byron, one of his contemporaries, would channel his admiration for the same figure into a series of mercurial protagonists that would codify an archetype is hardly surprising. While crediting Byron with inventing the Byronic hero is a significant stretch considering the archetype is really just Satan rebranded, there is one key component of this character that Byron did add to the equation, and that is a particular kind of longing that a number of commentators have likened to homesickness. Love is homesickness, Sigmund Freud wrote in his seminal essay on the Uncanny. In terms of understanding the human mind, Freud is one small step above total quack, but as far as narrative theory is concerned he made some compelling arguments, this being one of them. As Deborah Lutz says in her essay Love as Homesickness: Longing for a Transcendental Home in Byron and the Dangerous Lover Narrative, the Byronic hero often[] is a criminal, an outlaw who is not only self-exiled, but actively, hatefully, works against society as a murderous pirate, yet also often feels, pains of remorse, not only for his crime but also for his self-inflicted homelessness. Kylo Ren, with his laments of Im being torn apart, and let the past die, kill it if you have to rhetoric interspersed with explosive bouts of self-loathing, could not be more emblematic of this facet of the Byronic hero if he tried.

All of this helps explain what makes this archetype emotionally engaging, but not how self-hating emotional clusterfuck became sexy. In order to get to the bottom of that, we actually need to go back quite a bit. In Western culture, sexuality, death, and evil have been birds of a feather since the nascence of Christianity, which took vague correlations between these concepts already present in several Greek mythological figures and ran with them. While the Devil is often depicted as a hideous beast, the concept that he might also take the form of a manspecifically, an attractive onedates back centuries (Lucifer was the prettiest, remember), and is apparent in a number of surviving records of witch trial confessions detailing demonic encounters. But taking on a handsome face is not the only attribute frequently bestowed upon Satan and his kin. As Toni Reed writes in her book Demon Lovers and their Victims in British Fiction, identifying Satan and other demons with sexuality, especially with huge phalluses, may well trace back to Greek mythology.

Thats right. Satan has serious BDE. Do with that information what you will.

Its worth noting that the Byronic hero is ultimately a beloved romantic fantasy not because it represents something many people want in real life, but precisely the opposite, much like how enjoying seeing the lions at the zoo doesnt mean you want one in your house. Hes a darkly tempting, narratively intriguing prospect that is enjoyable to experience vicariously through fiction, a Pandoras box that can be opened and then closed again without repercussion. Times and tastes change and the Byronic hero evolves to suit themdevil, tempestuous gentleman, wannabe Sithbut his defining characteristics and their guilty pleasure appeal are eternal.

Read more here:

How the Devil Became a Dreamboat: Exploring the Byronic Hero with Kylo Ren - Film School Rejects

(Mosaica Press, 2019), by Shmuel PhillipsReviewed by: Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein

In this outstanding book, Shmuel Phillips examines various facets of Torah and Judaism from the so-called rationalist viewpoint. He puts that approach to Judaism in perspective by offering an uncensored presentation of Maimonides views without cherry-picking passages to match a certain preconceived notion of what Jewish rationalism ought to be. In doing so, Phillips offers a fair and open-minded analysis of Maimonidean thought.

Many critics of mainstream contemporary Judaism have misappropriated rationalism to support their own whims. As Rabbi Micha Berger so eloquently put it, The mind is a wonderful organ for justifying decisions the heart already reached. In his work, Shmuel Phillips shows that rationalism does not necessarily entail rejecting traditional Judaism and actually dovetails nicely with it. He demonstrates how even Maimonidesthe hero of so-called Rational Judaismdid not endorse free-standing rationalism, but rather a rationalism grounded in certain immutable truths, which the mature scholar can only absorb through rigorous character development and the study of both the Written and Oral Torah.

This heavy book (both in terms of its physical weight and the weighty nature of its discussions) calmly provides the reader with a rationalist view of the Torahs attitude to such sensitive topics as homosexuality, polygamy, rape, eshet yefat toar(comfort women in war zones), and gender roles.. He tackles raging controversial topics like slavery and genocide (i.e. wiping out Amalek) in the Torah, and the ubiquitous questions of objective morality and how to reconcile Torah and Science. Phillips also gives logical and rational justifications for such occurrences as halachic loopholes, ritual law, anti-Semitism, miracles, and prophecy.

Phillips takes on Biblical criticism by citing such scholars as Prof. Joshua Berman who explain away linguisticand even thematicsimilarities between the Bible and other ancient writings by invoking the notion that the Torah writes in the way that people spoke and could be most easily understood and internalized by its original audience. While following this approach, Phillips convincingly argues that this approach is entirely in line with Maimonidean thought. In doing so, Phillips tone remains authoritative and non-apologetic, and his arguments are conservative, yet cogent. Phillips invokes Rav Hirsch to quell the concerns of Bible Critics by characterizing the Written Torah as written in a sort of code that can only be deciphered through the Oral Torah. This, of course, accounts for all sorts of stylistic and thematic inconsistencies and redundancies.

Phillips also expounds on the Torahs Universalist message by following Rav Hirsch in characterizing the struggle between Noahs three sons as an allusion to the fight between unbridled violence (Ham), the culture of aesthetics (Japheth), and spiritual enlightenment through Godliness and morality (Shem). The ramifications of this three-way conflict continue to reverberate throughout the world as it stands as the basis for the contemporary clash of cultures.

This book also broaches the topic of how to view Aggadic Midrashim. More Kabbalistically-inclined authorities tend to take theseaggadotat face value and understand them as the intended meaning of the texts which they interpret. However, rationalists in the mold of Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, andto some extentRadak beg to differ. They maintain that the tradition ofaggadotought to be treated separately from the texts upon which they nominally expound, and said texts should only be understood in their simplest, literal sense. While some have understood that the rationalistsreject aggadot, Phillips demonstrates that they simply compartmentalizeaggadotand create a clear barrier between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, without rejecting the latter. Moreover, Phillips demonstrates that even some of the Kabbalists, like Maharal and possibly Rashi, maintain that while all exegeses are connected to the Torahs text (which must contain the totality of all truths), they can sometimes be interpreted as referring to the spiritual dynamics which underpin the plain meaning.

Each chapter takes the reader on a masterfully-written journey through the rationalistic perspective on a different topic. Truth is, you can probably write an entire book for each chapter, but given the framework, this exceptional work does an excellent job at concisely treating each issue with much erudition.

Phillips has a knack for turning a phrase in a way that clarifies complex ideas in just a few words. His skilled use of subtle humor and witty alliteration make the subtitles in each chapter almost as fun as reading the content itself. He is clearly a talented writer who has the ability to write up complicated philosophical/theological arguments in an easy-to-read English, without sacrificing accuracy or complexity.

This reviewer respectfully disagrees with Rabbi Dr. Lord Jonathan Sacks approbation which characterizes Philips book as providing a remarkable new philosophical approach to Torah and Jewish faith In this reviewers opinion, Phillips has offered the reader nothing new other than an unbiased presentation of the theosophies of Rambam, R. Yehuda HaLevi, Rav Hirsch, and R. Meir Simcha of Dvinskessentially allowing the timeless words of these great luminaries to speak for themselves. Phillip does update the presentation of those philosophies in order to express them in more contemporary terms, but he is certainly not offering anything radically new. He essentially presents the ideas behind the rationalist stream of traditional Judaism in a sophisticated and contemporary way, and for this alone he deserves to be commended.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein is the author of the book God versus Gods: Judaism in the Age of Idolatry and of the book Lashon HaKodesh: History, Holiness, & Hebrew. He is a member of the RCA, and currently serves as an editor for the VeromemanuFoundations new edition of Machberes Menachem. He resides in Beitar Illit, Israel and can be reached via email at[emailprotected].

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Judaism Reclaimed: Philosophy and Theology in the Torah - The Jewish Voice