Acton Institute PowerBlog - Entries from Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Jaroslav Pelikan 1923-2006

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Jaroslav Pelikan

Jaroslav Pelikan, the great historian of the Christian Tradition, died May 13 at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 82 years old and had been battling lung cancer.

Pelikan wrote more than 30 books and over a dozen reference works covering the entire history of Christianity. Perhaps his best known work is the five-volume “The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine.” In 2003, he published “Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition.” He was Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University.

Pelikan, raised a Lutheran, was received into the Orthodox Church in 1998. His obituary on the home page of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary notes that Pelikan “often quoted a line from Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ which says, ‘What you have as heritage take now as task, and thus you will make it your own.’ Unlike most church historians, who focus on one period or one aspect, Dr Pelikan ranked as one of the only authorities in the entire field of Christian history. His books and articles included subjects as diverse as the New Testament, the Reformation, Saint Augustine, Kierkegaard and medieval philosophy, and he is credited with broadening Western church scholarship to include the Eastern Orthodox tradition.” In 2005, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press also published “Orthodoxy and Western Culture,” a collection of essays honoring Pelikan on his 80th birthday.

You can listen to an interview Pelikan did with the public radio program Speaking of Faith on the topic of “The Need for Creeds.” The page also includes a transcript of the program.

Also see “The Doctrine Doctor,” Mark Noll’s interview with Pelikan in Christianity Today.

MAY HIS MEMORY BE ETERNAL

Posted by John Couretas in News and Events at 16:34 | Comment (1) | Trackback

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christianity, history, theology

The Mandate of the State

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

In his fragmentary and incomplete Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer examines the reality of the will of God, which he contends come to us from Scripture in the form of four mandates: work, marriage, government, and church. Here’s a great summary of Bonhoeffer’s view of the mandate of the government or state, from his essay, “Christ, Reality, and Good,” pages 72-73:

The divine mandate of government already presupposes the mandates of work and marriage. In the world that it rules, government finds already existing these two mandates through which God the Creator exercises creative power and upon which government must rely. Government itself cannot produce life or values. It is not creative. Government maintains what is created in the order that was given to the creation by God’s commission. Government protects what is created by establishing justice in acknowledgment of the divine mandates and by enforcing this justice with the power of the sword. Thus, marriage is not made by the government, but is affirmed by the government. The great spheres of work are not themselves undertaken by the government, but they are subject to its supervision within certain limits—later to be described—to governmental direction. Government should never seek to become the agent of these areas of work, for this would seriously endanger their divine mandate along with its own. By establishing justice, and by the power of the sword, government preserves the world for the reality of Jesus Christ. Everyone owes obedience to this government—according to the will of Christ.

Posted by Jordan J. Ballor in Bible and Theology at 13:48 | Comment (1) | Trackback

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bonhoeffer, church and state, government, justice

Scan this Book! Break the Law!

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

As a brief follow-up to my post last week about the state of scholarly publishing, I want to highlight this recent article in The New York Times, “Scan This Book!” by Kevin Kelly, who is on the staff at Wired magazine.

He conjures up the same image as Janet H. Murray, of “the great library at Alexandria,” and laments that “for 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.”

But when Murray predicted the inevitable advent of the universal library nearly a decade ago, she acknowledged some complicating factors, such as consumer taste and market forces. Kelly makes similar predictions about the inevitability of absolute digitization: “The reign of the copy is no match for the bias of technology. All new works will be born digital, and they will flow into the universal library as you might add more words to a long story.”

But he won’t admit the validity of any real barriers, be they economic, social, or even legal. He writes, “The great continent of orphan works, the 25 million older books born analog and caught between the law and users, will be scanned. Whether this vast mountain of dark books is scanned by Google, the Library of Congress, the Chinese or by readers themselves, it will be scanned well before its legal status is resolved simply because technology makes it so easy to do and so valuable when done. In the clash between the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen, the screen will prevail.”

Thus, he concludes, “On this screen, now visible to one billion people on earth, the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge.” I think Kelly is correct about the power of search and its implications for new depth and complexity with respect to learning. I don’t think he’s right that such a digital “Tower of Babel” project is inevitable, at least in the sense that all books will be digital and they will also be completely open access.

Intellectual property laws are created to protect the economic incentive for people to create things. New technology isn’t going to suddenly replace the need for people to be paid for what they make. Kelly points to the paradigm in the sciences as an alternative, but as I noted earlier, the strange economics of scientific publishing is created in large part because of the widespread dependence on subsidization by the government. The same publishing paradigm simply won’t work for commercial and popular publications.

Posted by Jordan J. Ballor in Technology & Regulation at 10:17 | Comment (1) | Trackback

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digitization, publishing

Geldof Trades Up

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Sir Bob, Free Trader?

The May 16 Independent is guest-edited by the ubiquitous Bono and sports the RED brand--another Bono project where a share of the profits from the mag will be donated to fighting AIDS and poverty in Africa. (Other companies with RED brands include Converse, American Express, Armani, and GAP.) See the issue for yourself (where you will find a critique of subsidies, as well as Nelson Mandela giving props to RED as well as an interview with commedian Eddie Izzard--two men who much too rarely share a marquee).

What is of special interest to PowerBloggers is the article by Bob Geldof, founder of Live8, titled: Aid isn’t the answer. Africa must be allowed to trade its way out of poverty. This is the same Bob Geldof who has been lobbying for huge aid packages for twenty years, the same Bob Geldof who said “We must do something, even if it doesn’t work.” It quite something that this same fella who wrote the following:

In a time of weak world leadership, when the WTO negotiators are failing so miserably, let us remind their bosses - Bush, Chirac, Merkel et al - that we agree with them when they argue that, long term, “aid isn’t the answer”, and that the continent of Africa and its people must trade its way into the global market and sit where it rightfully belongs, negotiating as equals with the rest of us.

As always, I have no interest in questioning the intentions of Bob and Co.--I think they are the noblest of intentions, and I think more people ought to share their zeal for the poor. But could this admission that long term aid isn’t the answer mean that projects like the ONE Campaign are losing their luster? Or are people realizing that governments can’t solve poverty, but maybe the corrective is individual charity and free trade amongst free peoples?

And it is also worth noting that the cover art for the mag includes “Gen. 1:27”--I will save you the trouble of looking it up: “God created man in his own image; in the divine image he created them; male and female he created them.” I am curious how far Bono has parsed out the implications of this statement, as this verse lays the foundation for many of Acton’s economic arguments (for example, see here).

Posted by David Michael Phelps in International Trade at 10:11 | Leave a comment | Trackbacks (2)

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africa, AIDS, bono, free trade, geldof, government subsidies, one campaign