So much has happened this week in several blogs that we all frequent, not to mention outside or prodigious circle. Moreover, several noteworthies from the summer escaped my mention one way or another. Take this posting as my unofficial and abridged “I Don’t Know What You Did This Summer, But Here’s What You Should Have Been Reading.” I reserve the right to add to this list, to expect you all to follow up on the items herein, and to mock the many, dare I say most, of you who don’t. We’ll start with this week and work backward.

August 8. Fr. Edward T. Oakes published a charming and timely piece on the First Things blog on Wednesday called “On Canons”. If you’ve been keeping up with Janet and the most recent discussion over at Deep Grace of Theory, or you’ve been following the discussion on the nature of Christian philosophy or the comments under the Balthasar podcast, or you haven’t had your head buried in the sand, you might find his article illuminating. You’ll at least be tickled by such lines as: “No one disputes Hegel’s status as a canonical philosopher; but anyone who has tried to work through his rebarbative prose quickly comes to see how little literary merit counts when it comes to admittance in the ranks of canonical philosophers.” Ok, that’s hilarious to me. And I’m not ashamed to admit that I didn’t know what “Rebarbative” means. Hell, my spell checker doesn’t even recognize it. So, for all you playas out there -

Rebarbative: adjective; from French rébarbatif, from Middle French, from rebarber to be repellent; REPELLENT, IRRITATING

Here’s the really salient bit, especially for Janet. “To add to the problem [of defining what's canonical in philosophy and what's not], there is the fact of Western intellectual history that no one fails to notice: Science makes progress, philosophy doesn’t. The repetition of both errors and truths embarrasses the history of philosophy when compared to history of science, where – according to the standard modern (as opposed to postmodern) narrative – error is corrected by truth and does not recur.” Contentious enough for you, yet? Well, how does Oakes propose we deal with this problem of how to determine our philosophical canon. It’s not quite as easy as picking and choosing our favs and our despised: “I think Etienne Gilson gets close to my point when he drolly says in his book The Unity of Philosophical Experience: ‘There is more that one excuse for being Descartes, but there is no excuse whatsoever for be Cartesian.’ Nearly all philosophers of whatever stripe are united in contemning Cartesianism; yet there Descartes sits, like the Cheshire cat perched on his branch in the canonical tree, smiling at all the derision he gets from behaviorists, Thomists, Aristotelians, animal psychologists, neurologists – undislodgeable!” The answer – Scott will love this – is Thomism.. well, not quite, but in another bad nutshell, the problem with philosophy today is that, while having all the earmarks of Christian tradition, it is constantly trying to get away from reacting to, and making ample use of Christianity. In the words of Mortimer Adler, “Christianity has made problems for [philosophers] which they can not solve without faith, but which they will not refrain from discussing in rational terms.” But are Thomists dealing with the current problems of philosophy? Oakes: “The temptation for the Thomist here is to made Thomism a filly coherent, internally cohesive, locked-in while, a sealed-off bathysphere or an impregnable siege engine, impermeable to the lessons, both good and bad, that modern philosophy teachers … Good luck trying to overcome that prejudice. Because of the influence of seminary Thomism before Vatican II, the impression often arose that Thomism is a fully formed system… Are Thomists being trained in the history of modern philosophy to take up where, for example, James Collins left off in his magisterial God in Modern Philosophy?” Please read his entire article.

Next, the August 6th New Yorker rings the alarm we rang on May 30th (thanks to Salon.com.) Apparently, the honey bee decline is getting so bad that California is eventually going to have to rent the entire honey bee population currently in North America just to pollinate its almond crop. Where that leaves the needs of the rest of us is anyone’s guess.

Now, for the summer:

Archbishop Rowan Williams was interviewed and had his mug featured on the cover of Time magazine. You can read the interview here, and you can listen to the podcast here. Williams expresses his view that both sides must come together in compromise for the sake of the church. The article does a nice job of couching the issue not only in terms of the sexual ethics but, but also in terms of stability for the countries involved.

On the flip side, First Things published the Ugandan Archibishop Henry Luke Orombi. Orombi argues that the decisive element of Anglicanism, pace Williams, is not liturgical practices and mutual respect in dialogue. Rather, it’s martyrdom and evangelization, all aimed at advancing “The Word of God.” All tools of communion must be oriented toward “holding each other accountable to Scripture”. He then describes how the call to the Scripture in Ugandan society has transformed cultural practices there. In his eyes, backing down from the demands made on TEC would be comprimising on sexual ethics, thereby denying the transformative power of Scritpure and its effects in his own society. Yet, reading the article, one wonders at his seemingly black and white understanding of cultural issues and how he argues through examination of cultural norms and transformation in Uganda for what he expects to be the common Anglican element. The Church of England certainly didn’t get its start with conservative sexual ethics, and I doubt that stances such as Orombi’s will change many minds. Moreover, when we look at what has really been common to the Anglican church, and then read Orombi’s article, something is suspiciously amiss- what happened to The Book of Common Prayer. Hmmm. The real common anchor of Anglican life has been a liturgical one all along. Go figure!

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I think we are facing a series of problems like this, problems that are environmental in nature, and this has been a real eye-opener for me as to how poorly prepared this country and countries around the world are in taking note of how climate change or global change will impact our ecosystems. Humanity is affecting our ecosystems, and it’s very complex to determine whether this is due to environmental change or some disease. You can see now that it is very difficult to pull these things apart.

The fact that Christians aren’t leading the charge in issues like the catastrophic decline of the honeybee and other polinator population is crazy. For me, it all boils down to the really poor to non-existent doctrine of creation and ensuing experience of the world many of us have. The experts are right; if the bee population can’t sustain the polination demand, it’s not like we’re going to get our produce somewhere else. We’re screwed. Hopefully someone will write a sequel to Assault on Reason and call it Assault on Hunny in my Tummy.

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