Is Morality in Disrepair? (May)
church as NGO, national divorce, the pursuit of happiness, gun control, female philosophers and whether women can teach, every parent's tech conundrum, who young Christians are reading & Tim Keller
Over the past month, thanks to Benjamin Lipscomb, I’ve immersed myself in the thinking of four 20th century philosophers whose ideas revolutionized ethics: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. Each grappled with and opposed the idea, popular at the time, that observable, measurable, verifiable reality was the only standard of truth or fact, while morality was subjective, feelings-based, relative, inconsequential. Having witnessed with the world the atrocities of Hitler’s regime, these four women opposed this ivory-tower idea, instead arguing that there is an objective standard of right and wrong, good and bad, and that we can expect human beings to know and abide by a moral law.
Having piqued my interest, Lipscomb’s book prompted me to re-read Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal work, After Virtue, which diagnoses the state of moral disrepair in (specifically) Western culture. MacIntyre demonstrates how and why the language of morality has become fractured, and points to the polarity of our political discourse to show that our public is deeply moral but lacks the language and tools necessary to judge whose morality is just.
The Women Are Up To Something may also prompt me to re-read Iris Murdoch’s Sovereignty of Good, which was another favorite of mine in graduate school. (Perhaps the greatest quote in the book: “Possibly Heidegger is Lucifer in person.”)
However, one anecdote regarding Anscombe that I learned from my Theological Ethics professor and advisor at Yale, Adam Eitel, did not make it into the book. While teaching philosophy at Oxford, a student snuck into the classroom before class and wrote on the chalk board, “Anscombe breeds,” a crass reference to her return from leave after having another child (Anscombe had seven children in all). Anscombe, seeing the statement on the chalk board upon her entry into class, walked promptly to the board, picked up the chalk, and completed the sentence — “Anscombe breeds immortal beings.” And without saying a word, she began her lecture for the day.
Apparently this story is Anscombe lore, and no one is quite sure of its veracity. Perhaps it’s been embellished or warped over time. But the story doesn’t seem out of keeping with what we do know of the incredible woman who was G.E.M. Anscombe.
Elizabeth Anscombe is a personal hero of mine — she was a devout Catholic and did, in fact, help revitalize the tradition of virtue ethics in a world where the meaning of morality had become fractured. It’s still in disrepair. But this little Mommy Blog is my own vive la résistance. And “Anscombe Breeds Immortal Beings” has been the unofficial tagline of the blog since the beginning!
And speaking of ethics… This month I was accepted as a Fellow at the Paul Ramsey Center for Bioethics and Culture! For the next two years I’ll join the Ramsey cohort in California for weekend seminars on bioethics. I’m very excited to deepen my understanding of bioethics and to pair it with my own project of thinking through Protestant conceptions of contraception (pun semi-intended). Check out the other Fellows and a bit more about the program here. And while you’re at it, check out this recent essay on Ramsey penned by none other than my very own husband, John Shelton, whose Substack you should also follow. Alright, enough with the self-promotion.
Here’s what else my brain has been up to this month.
Reading
Books
The Narnian, Alan Jacobs — “When we talk today about receptiveness to stories, we tend to contrast that attitude to one governed by reason - we talk about freeing ourselves from the shackles of the rational mind and that sort of thing - but no belief was more central to Lewis's mind than the belief that it is eminently, fully rational to be responsive to the enchanting power of stories.”
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving — “When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
All My Knotted-Up Life, Beth Moore — “And when enough hardship happens within a small circumference, the roads to all the familiar places are little more than crisscrossing scars. By the time every direction you could take at a four-way stop—right, left, straight ahead, or reverse—carries the stomach-turning scent of carnage, moving can mean surviving.”
The Women Are Up to Something, Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb — A wonderful intellectual history, mentioned above, of four brilliant philosophers of ethics at Oxford in the 20th century: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. I want to be like them when I grow up.
Live No Lies, John Mark Comer — “We make our decisions, and then our decisions make us. In the beginning we have a choice, but eventually, we have a character.”
Bible
1 & 2 Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah
“He created 3,000 proverbs; his songs added up to 1,005. He knew all about plants, from the huge cedar that grows in Lebanon to the tiny hyssop that grows in the cracks of a wall. He understood everything about animals and birds, reptiles and fish. Sent by kings from all over the earth who had heard of his reputation, people came from far and near to listen to the wisdom of Solomon.” 1 Kings 4:29-34
“But friends, your dead will live, your corpses will get to their feet. All you dead and buried, wake up! Sing! Your dew is morning dew catching the first rays of sun, The earth bursting with life, giving birth to the dead.” Isaiah 26:19
“Forget about what’s happened; don’t keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new. It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it? There it is! I’m making a road through the desert, rivers in the badlands.” Isaiah 43:16-21
“Use words truly and well. Don’t stoop to cheap whining. Then, but only then, you’ll speak for me.” Jeremiah 15:19-21
Articles / Essays
Church as NGO, Jake Meador, Mere Orthodoxy — “This is the fear I have: Lingering behind “church-as-content” is a vision of church that essentially sees it as a kind of non-profit or NGO that dispenses spiritual experiences (and perhaps tangible material aid) to its consumers. This is the error before all errors because it is the error that fundamentally misnames the people of God.”
America Is Pursuing Happiness in All the Wrong Places, Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic — “And still today, the pursuit of happiness is what leaders must promote and protect. Their job is not to make us happy—no government can or should try to do that—but to protect our ability to pursue our happiness freely.”
I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise. Leah Libresco, Washington Post — “Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I'd lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.”
Does 1 Timothy 2:12-15 prohibit women from teaching or having authority over men? Philip B. Payne, The Christian Post — “The problem with using 1 Timothy 2:12 to prohibit women from teaching or having authority over men isn’t just that it doesn’t clearly teach this. The crucial problem with excluding women from teaching and from having authority over men is that so many foundational principles of the Bible directly oppose this, including each of the following theological axioms from Paul that man and woman are equally:
created in God’s image,
given dominion over the earth,
given the creation blessing,
given the creation mandate,
and are equally in Christ.”
The kind of Greek exegesis I wanted in high school/college when I was studying Greek, had questions about this passage and its translation, and was brushed off by a youth pastor who told me, “Just hit the easy button and marry a pastor!” *eye roll*
Sports Betting Is the New Oxycontin, Eric Spitznagel, The Free Press — “No longer does one require an under-the-table bookie to place a bet. Now, you can lose staggering amounts of money just by downloading an app.”
You Have Permission to Be a Smartphone Skeptic, Clare Coffey, The Bulwark — “I am fairly certain that the self-restraint and self-discipline required to use a smartphone well— that is, to treat it purely as an occasional tool rather than as a totalizing way of life—are unreasonable things to demand of teenagers.”
From Feeding Moloch to 'Digital Minimalism', Ruth Gaskovski, Substack — “We may believe that we have moved beyond submitting children to such abhorrent circumstances, but I would suggest that we have merely turned the circumstances inward. Our children are suffering, not because of inhumane physical labour, but because of the increasingly inhumane conditions bred by their digital existence.”
The Parents Saying No to Smartphones, Olivia Reingold, The Free Press — “Meanwhile, a growing body of research shows that smartphones are at least partly to blame for skyrocketing rates of teenage anxiety and depression. As author Jonathan Haidt, reporting on a recent worldwide study on smartphone use among nearly 28,000 youths, put it: “The younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health the young adult reports today.””
Who are young Christians reading today? and Part 2, Brad East, Resident Theologian — “None of these kids are reading anything, whether they are cream of the crop or nothing of the kind. And they’re certainly not reading bona fide theology or intellectually demanding spiritual writing. All of them, including the smartest and most ambitious, are online, all the time, full stop.”
A pastor who truly loved his neighbors, even across deep divides, Tish Harrison Warren, New York Times — “Tim’s relationship with me was yet another example of his investment in people across difference. He was in a denomination that doesn’t ordain women, and he believed the Bible calls for distinct roles for men and women within the church and the household. I am a woman who is an ordained priest. We discussed our disagreements openly, but the conversations were never hostile. We found far more unity in our mutual faith in Christ and commitment to the Bible than our differences could undo.”
Poetry
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front (selection)
by Wendell Berry
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Writing
POINT: A House Divided Once Again, Katelyn Walls Shelton, WORLD — “Abraham Lincoln once said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” If abortion is left up to the states alone, if the personhood of the unborn is not recognized by all, we are as divided as the slave and free states of Lincoln’s America. “This government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” Lincoln warned. So long as we try to maintain different standards of personhood, the temptation toward secession—or a national divorce, as some members of Congress have suggested—will, God forbid, only continue to sound more appealing.”
Related: COUNTERPOINT by Daniel Suhr, and the framing for the two articles, by Dr. Albert Mohler
Author’s page, WORLD Magazine — more coming soon!
Loving
I’m currently loving Hoopla and Libby, the two apps I use to listen to books on a regular basis! Hoopla has a lot of smaller, more niche titles, like many of the Christian books I enjoy reading. I highly recommend checking to see if your library participates in either or both of these apps, which have greatly increased my reading ability since having kids.
Remembering
This Month
Gala time!
We love our internet friends <3
Morning with Mom!
Happy meal, happy boys <3
“I flying!”
Sweet Home Tennessee
Enjoying the spoils of strawberry picking!
Life these days.
Last day of school *teary eyes*
“Beach church” on Pentecost
My beach babes <3
My husband, John, made a great point that those (such as R.M. Hare) who asserted morality was relative/subjective were also responding to the horrors of the world wars. Hare, in fact, fought in WWII. To come to terms with the atrocity of war, Hare rejected morality, while Anscombe, Foot, Midgely, and Murdoch embraced it. But they all were responding to human evil and chaos, trying to make sense of it. R.M. Hare’s son, John Hare, was one of my most beloved professors at Yale Divinity School, and taught my favorite class -- Theological Aesthetics. He’s a brilliant philosopher/theologian in his own right.