Happy Bday Facebook

From The Writer's Alamanac for 2/4/10 (see here)

It was on this day in 2004 that Mark Zuckerburg launched Facebook (at first called "the facebook"). The Web site's name comes from the student directory book with names and photos that is distributed to incoming students at many universities. Harvard sophomore Zuckerburg, a comp-sci major, had gotten the idea for doing an online facebook when he was slightly drunk on a Tuesday night. He'd just been dumped by his girlfriend, he was looking for a distraction, and he hacked into a Harvard database and copied student names and photos from dorm lists and put them online into a site for which he'd written the code. It was immensely popular: In the first four hours it was up, 450 Harvard students used it to look at 22,000 photos of their classmates. A few days later, the site was shut down by Harvard and Zuckerburg was charged with a number of disciplinary things, including violating privacy rules and breaching security. Eventually, the university dropped the charges, and Zuckerburg moved to Palo Alto set up Facebook, Inc. without graduating from Harvard. Today, about 350 million people around the world actively use Facebook as a social networking tool.

See also this commentary on how things like blogs (yikes!) and tweets play into a culture where celebrity is the highest aim.

What matters?

Well-known preach Timothy L. Brown, in an article in Reformed Worship, writes the following:

"The holy and ancient guild to which we preacher/pastors belong has never honored us for 'muchness' and 'manyness'-but more for depth and faithfulness."

Enough said.

Take that California!

"Among civilized peoples, cold is said to be the parent of frugality. Thus the Northern nations of Europe owe a portion of their prosperity to the rigor of their climate. Cold makes them save during summer, to provide food, coal, and clothing during winter. It encourages house-building and house-keeping. Hence Germany is more industrious than Sicily; Holland and Belgium than Andalusia..." And may I add, Michigan than California. Okay, okay, so maybe the economy doesn't reflect that...

(Quote from Samuel Smiles' Thrift, pg 45)

By the way, I thought this quote was incredibly interesting in light of a saying such as Proverbs 6:6-11. Smiles' quote shows (if it indeed can be explained in the right way) that one can learn wisdom from nature, which seems to be the entire point of Proverbs 6:6-11 on two levels: (1) the ant learns wise behavior from the seasons, (2) so we can learn wise behavior from seasons and from the ant who learns it from seasons!

This ability to learn from seasons and nature in general, of course, is no surprise to reformed thinkers who hold to a robust anthopology [cf. Anthony Hoeksema's phrase, 'psychosomatic (soul-body) unity' to describe the essential distinct feature of humanity]. The book, Dakota, by Kathleen Norris was an eye-opener to me in seeing how geography and climate affect the human spirit. Worth a careful read.

Only God is God

Tolkien, in a letter to his son, about government:

“…The proper study of man is anything but man. And the most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity…”

Updates

So a few updates - t-minus four days to our wedding! Staying very busy with that and anticipating the big day.
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Alright, my last post promised that I would finish the thought in the near future, which is clearly a falsity at this point! Though the intention was there, the time was not. I've read Margaret Farley's 'Just Love' and a collection of Meileander's essays the last couple of months so I'm ready to think about other things now!
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I've been reading 'To Live in Peace' by Mark Gornik. This is wonderful theological writing - very autobiographical (he "owns" the material), interacting with the grand theological frameworks (Moltmann on hope, Volf on church, Millbanks on sociology, etc), and oozing Scripture (especially Isaiah!).

I've thought about this book so far in this way: Tim Keller says that any passage of Scripture can be 'used' to speak towards 1) personal piety (individual human hearts), 2) faith (intellectual understanding of doctrine), or 3) social transformation (action in the community - ecclesial or secular). To be fair, Keller uses that framework to evaluate sermons, but he helpfully notes that preachers (and I think we could say writers as well) tend towards one of these three. The objective therefore is to force ourselves on occassion towards the other two as well. I think my weakest area here is the last one, and this is precisely where Gornik excels (though he certainly does not fail at the others). His uses of Isaiah are especially helpful to me so far, because he is showing me that Isaiah, for example, can be read as a missiological text for urban neighborhoods and community transformation.
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I should be back blogging here in a month or so. We'll see!

Augustine on Proper Sexual Desire

Augustine often uses the food appetite as an analogy to discussing proper sexual desire. He delineates two aspects of eating:

A1: The proper purpose or end of eating: nourishment
B1: The pleasure derived from eating

Augustine claims that seeking the pleasure beyond the proper end is sinful. We want to agree with this basic point. Meileander, however, wants to challenge what Augustine lists in “A1”. He asks, isn’t there more to eating than feeding to stay alive? Doesn’t it also cultivate human community and facilitate other important desires like symbolic representation and enjoyable conversation? Why else would we eat in heaven (see City of God, 13.22)?

Here is the parallel situation for sexual activity:
A2: The proper purpose or end of sexual activity between spouses: procreation
B2: The pleasure derived from sexual activity

To make the point again, when “B2” is pursued beyond “A2” then we have sinful sexual activity. In other words, according to Augustine, every time sexual desire is felt it must be for the purpose of procreation or else the desire is sinful. Augustine actually takes it even further in his commentary on Genesis. He notes that in the Garden (before the fall) Adam and Eve would have first desired children (“A2” would come first), and then they would desire to have sexual intercourse and enjoy it as a result (“B2” would follow as a decision of the will). In other words, the pleasure would be “a kind of bonus” (Meileander, pg 131) or side-effect and not part of the motivation towards intercourse.

But if we could include the good of human community, symbolic enactment, and edifying conversation in "A1" then maybe we could similarly include more in “A2” than merely procreation. Catholic theology itself has added in a very official way the sacramental good or, as Baptists would have it, symbolic enactment, to “A2”. But maybe enrichment of a marriage relationship (what some Catholic ethicists are now calling “the unitive good of marriage”) could also be added to “A2”. If we add these other two proper ends to sexual activity between spouses, we would have the following:

A2: The proper purposes or ends of sexual activity between spouses: procreation, symbolism of Christ and the church, and enrichment of the relationship

Meileander then turns (pg 136ff) to show how these three goods in “A2” must interrelate. More on this in the next post.

[These points are largely taken from 'The Way that Leads There' by Gilbert Meileander]

[In Margaret Farley's profound work 'Just Love', she makes the startling observation that the 'unitive good' and 'procreative good' may not be too far apart - if properly experienced, they both may be collapsed into the latter. I'll be quiet now and let her speak: "...it is possible that meanings of sexuality [what we've called 'purposes' in this post] come together - in passion, tenderness, and a love so full that sexuality mediates new being." (pg 163)]

The City of God

Peter Leithart, Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, & Hope In Western Literature (ix):

"Viewed as a whole . . . the Christian account of history is eschatological not only in the sense that it comes to a definitive and everlasting end, but in the sense that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. The Christian Bible moves not from garden lost to garden restored, but from garden to garden-city. God gives with interest."

(Thanks to - here - for this quote)