Monday Miscellany
05 August 2024
Greetings!
Peace, mercy, and grace be with you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I’m back! Nathaniel and I enjoyed a great week at the 2024 National Order of the Arrow Conference (NOAC) held at Colorado University in Boulder. But with the heat and the poor air quality because of the wildfires all around, now I need some rest time.
I hope and pray all is well with all of you.
Sunday, August 03, 2024
The Voice 14.31: Begging the Question
We continue considering logical fallacies with begging the question: trying to advance what one is trying to prove as evidence in said argument. It’s not dodging or avoiding the question, which is its own thing. In religious terms, one will see begging the question take place whenever something which was generally held as self-evident is brought up and challenged.
This week we conclude our featuring of the stained glass at the St. Mungo Museum of Religious Life & Art in Glasgow with the portrayal of Paul.
Book Reviews
Jesus selected twelve men to be a special group of His disciples; one, Judas Iscariot, would betray Him and then kill himself in grief. Another witness, Matthias, would take Judas’ place. The promotion and advancement of Christianity began with and was centered on these twelve Apostles, but what can be known about them?
W. Brian Shelton takes the reader on a journey to attempt to understand what was believed about the ultimate fate of the twelve Apostles plus Paul in Quest for the Historical Apostles: Tracing Their Lives and Legacies (affiliate link; galley received as part of early review program).
The author tackles the complexities of the task well: the different names which are presented in the different texts; the many competing stories about where the various Apostles ended up and how most of them were martyred; and so on. For each Apostle the author presents what is known about their discipleship, what, if anything, is said about them in the Gospels or Acts; what they did write or what they were purported to have written; and the various stories of ministries in various places. The author concludes each by considering the legacy of the apostle and where it is believed they are buried.
For Peter, James, John, and Paul, the ground covered is pretty familiar. For the rest, generally, not so much. The author attempts to wade through all of the stories which attended to the various apostles but maintained a critical eye: conflations were many, and many of the legends would contradict one another. I appreciated how the author would present the information, considering all primary sources and many of the secondary sources, and then provide a reasonable conclusion, rarely granting the most incredible stories and legends while trying to discover any possible grain of historical truth within the narratives.
Those extremely critical of church tradition and the legends and hagiographies which have attended to the Apostles will most likely not be persuaded or impressed. But if you are interested in considering the legacies of each Apostle and the claims which attended to them, this is a great introductory resource.
What happened to Janesville is what has happened to America and is why America is not what it once was.
I was especially drawn to Janesville: An American Story (affiliate link) by Amy Goldstein because I grew up in Rockford, Illinois, about forty-five minutes or so south. Throughout my time attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2002-2005 I would drive through Janesville; I would occasionally stop for food or such like on Milton Avenue on the north side of town.
Otherwise, however, I would rarely venture up there, and even though I lived within an hour, I clearly did not know much about it. Before reading this book I was not aware of the major GM factory there, or that it was the home of Parker Pen.
And when I lived there, and drove through there, the GM factory was still going. This book chronicles what would happen to Janesville beginning in 2008, with the announcement of the closure of the GM plant and its hastened demise, until 2013, chronicling how the town and its citizens would respond to their changed environment.
The book follows a few families and town professionals and their stories throughout this period. Overall, it’s devastating. Those who retired from GM and could enjoy their pension were fine; so were those who were already well-ensconced in higher level white-collar work, like running the local bank.
But everyone else suffered all kinds of levels of diminished life quality. The best off financially were the “gypsies” who transferred to work at other GM plants but whose families remained in Janesville: they were able to maintain about the same standard of economic living, but the breadwinner would be gone for most of the week, and the families would acutely feel the lack of their presence.
Many others refused to do that to their families; they would thus suffer economically. Many bought into the general premise of retraining and finding new careers; most who did so found themselves in new jobs paying half or so what they made previously. Such retraining led one woman into a very dark place with a terrible end. Most of those who did not go the retraining route ironically ended up doing economically better than those who did, but still encountered a lot more job insecurity and wages were still far less than before. Teenagers end up working two or three jobs and their incomes help support their families, and it still really isn’t enough. All of the forms of charity are overwhelmed: they all experience greater need and have all lost significant sources of revenue and manpower.
By 2013, according to the numbers, it might seem like things had recovered: the unemployment rate was lower than it had been. People had jobs; but the quality of jobs were nothing like what existed before. There had been a stable middle class in Janesville, and all that attended to it; most of that was hollowed out.
And it wasn’t that Janesville workers were lazy or not motivated to work; they all wanted to work, and many were working multiple jobs.
What is most distressing about this story is how “normal” it was. It all took place after I had left the area and was living in northern Ohio and then in Los Angeles. But the story of what happened in Janesville from 2008 to the present is the same story as which took place in Rockford beginning a few years earlier than that. It was the story of the town in which I lived in northern Ohio, and really the whole area, highly dependent on the automotive industry. It’s probably the story of way too many areas in the Upper Midwest and around the country in general.
This book does not present itself as having a specific agenda save to chronicle and detail the fallout of the loss of a major employer in a small town. It does its job in a well and devastating way. If you want to know why America is as it is today, this is a good place to start.
May the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirits.
Ethan