Joel Miller is encouraging his readers to write in their books, especially the nonfiction. It will help their memory. It will be personally revelatory. It will lead to original verbages. And stuff.

I agree, and I’d like to thank my college English professor, Richard Cornelius, for encouraging me to go easy on these markings. A simple star, check, or v-mark in the margin is better than underlining a few lines. Using a notebook is probably better than writing comments in the margins too, but I don’t usually argue with writers in the margins of their books.

What marks do you make in your books?

Photo credit: Serguey

Just a little more about the American system, from a certified non-expert.

There are many expressions that we hear all our lives, beginning in our childhood (this is very noticeable in the church), expressions which we tend to skate over without considering their specific meanings.

“Freedom” and “equality” are two of those. I suspect a lot of Americans think they mean the same thing. And they most emphatically do not.

Here’s the thing our Founders understood, which neither the later French revolutionaries or most moderns comprehend. Freedom and equality are in fact mortal enemies.

If you have total freedom, equality is impossible, because some people will be more successful at what they do, and at life itself, than others. The weaker and the less intelligent may even be crushed under the feet of the stronger and the more clever.

If you want total equality, you’re going to have to clamp down on everybody, and ruthlessly cut off every head that pokes above the level of the average.

The American answer to that problem was to set up a system meant to achieve a balance. “Equality of opportunity” means everybody gets as equal a chance in the game as possible. But equality was never enshrined as an American motto, as it was for the French – “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” For Americans it was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

As for the losers in life’s game, their care was left to the family and the church. And they were encouraged to try again. America’s bankruptcy system was designed to permit people to start over, something European systems discouraged.

When people used to talk about the American way, that’s what they meant.

As our great national holiday approaches, I’m about to (fair warning) write about theoretical politics. I do so with a great deal of shame, because I should have understood this before. My thoughts were sparked by an article (to which I was directed by Ori Pomerantz) at First Thoughts, “Crushing Civil Society,” by Peter Leithart, an article which isn’t even about America but about eastern Europe under communism. Still it sparked a gap in the gap-rich environment of my brain, and helped me crystallize some pre-existing thoughts. In a way I should have done long ago.

The realization I came to while reading, although it involved no fresh ideas, provided me a new, systematic way to think about government. We – or at least I – tend to use the terms “civil society” and “government” almost interchangeably. But in fact they are very distinct things.

Civil society means the associations people naturally form, of their own volition. A church (at least in America) is a civil institution, because it wasn’t ordained by the government, but by a private group. Marriage is a civil matter – indeed, the union of man and woman as the kernel of the family forms the essential center of the civil order, which is why so many of us consider government redefinition of the institution a grave danger. Through most of history, people have gotten their “social welfare” from civil society – from their families and their churches (I’m speaking of the West. Other institutions dominated elsewhere in the world, though the family is pretty much universal).

But in order to get along with others in a civil society, that society must establish what we call “laws.” Our English word “law” (as I’ve mentioned here before) comes from an Old Norse word – “lagu” – which originally meant “layers.” It conveyed the idea of something that lies evenly on everyone – the rules by which we agree to work when we’re cooperating, whether on a Viking raid or in running our petty kingdom. Continue reading Of civil society →

Some are saying evangelical Christians should realize they have been defeated in recent political skirmishes and shut up. They’ve been too political for too long, they say. But Out of Ur says his experience hasn’t been dominated by politics.

“Given the lack of politics in my evangelical church experience, why do 75% of young non-Christians say evangelicals are ‘too political’? … Either my church engagement is wildly outside the norm, or perhaps evangelicals aren’t as devoted to political social engineering as the outside culture seems to believe we are.”

Even NPR’s Ira Glass thinks “what Christians really are is not being documented by the press.” But perception is deemed reality by most, if not all, of us, so how do we counter a politicized perception of who we are? (via Trevin Wax)

Original drum from the First Minnesota. Photo credit: Minnesota Historical Society.



Before the day is entirely over, I’d like to take the opportunity to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the charge of the First Minnesota Regiment at the battle of Gettysburg. Though the action was almost ignored in Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, and entirely ignored in Ralph Peters’ Cain at Gettysburg, the battle would certainly have been lost if those few farm boys from a new western state hadn’t counterattacked an overwhelming force in a hot wheat field.

Mitch Berg of Shot in the Dark can tell you all about it.

The charge drove back a force five times the size of the First. It bought the time needed for Hancock to get the reinforcements into the line and consolidate Cemetary Ridge.