I’ve been reading from a book of American speeches from the time of our nation’s founding to the Civil War. It’s good fodder for guilt over my short attention span and how I’ve wasted my life on the Internet. It also shows the value of knowing this kind of history, because arguments made 180 years ago are still circulating today.
John Calhoun’s defense of slavery in the South in a Senate speech in February 1837 goes from reasonable though wrong to ridiculous. We’ve heard the same fearmongering over the last couple years.
In Wendell Phillips’s response to the 1837 murder of abolitionist and journalist Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Missouri, he rebukes the characterization of the mob as patriots and bizarre criticisms of the freedom of the press. He says an Alton minister claims that no one has the right to print opinions with which his community disagrees. In fact, this minister says speaking what we think is evil.
“This clerical absurdity chooses as a check for the abuses of the press, not the law, but the dread of a mob,” Phillips states. “By doing so, it deprives not only the individual and the minority of their rights, but the majority also, since the expression of their opinion may sometimes provoke disturbance from the minority. A few men may make a mob as well as many.” No one would have a right to speak their mind, if it could provoke a mob.
Haven’t we heard similar arguments against this first freedom today?
John J. Dunphy of the Second Reading Book Shop in Alton, Missouri, reviews a new biography of Elijah Lovejoy, called “First to Fall.”
As for other links I wish to share today . . .
Publisher: Eerdmans – “We do not think it is for us as a publisher to define doctrine for the church,” but we won’t publish “false teaching.” Coming in August 2022 from Eerdmans is a transgender reading of Scripture.
Dostoevsky: “The advice every writer hears at one point or another? Write what you know. Whenever I hear those words I wonder, How do you explain murder stories?”
More important than being right: “Neither labels nor worldly ideologies require renewal or transformation. None of them require humility. And none of them bring life. They simply offer an unbalanced formula to conform to that creates a deeper divide within the church, as well as the culture at large.”
Fully human? “No true portraits of Africans by White artists existed; that White artists couldn’t see past their own ingrained stereotypes of Blackness.” The white author of this novel about two black men believes she can see past such stereotypes, but perhaps not clearly. (via Prufrock)
Photo: Main Street, Stillwater, Minnesota. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.