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Watch “Talking Ta-Nehisi Coates | Glenn Loury & John McWhorter [The Glenn Show]” on YouTube
This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring.
This summer, I spent an hour on the phone with Richard Spencer. It was an exchange that left me feeling physically sickened. Toward the end of the interview, he said one thing that I still think about often. He referred to the all-encompassing sense of white power so many liberals now also attribute to whiteness as a profound opportunity. “This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist,” he told me gleefully. “This is why I’m actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip.”
However far-fetched that may sound, what identitarians like Mr. Spencer have grasped, and what ostensibly anti-racist thinkers like Mr. Coates have lost sight of, is the fact that so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes. We will all be doomed to stalk our separate paths.
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/09/ta-nehisi-coates-george-packer-white-president/539976/
Posted in Uncategorized
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Church Clarity is outing Churches on their LGBTQ Stances
Posted in Daily Links and Notes
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Why we like, or don’t like a Bible story where God smites soldiers just following orders.
2 Kings 1 is another in a series of stories that on one level thrills us but also bothers people.
Ahaziah falls through the lattice. He’s not a Calvinist, arising and saying “glad that’s over”. Instead he wants to know if he’ll die so he sends a messenger to Philistine Ekron to find someone to inquire of Baal there. Lots of commentary about that mostly because we don’t know why he couldn’t simply consult at the Baal temple constructed in Samaria built by his father.
The angel of the Lord tips off Elijah who meets the messenger on the road and says “No God in Israel to do your fortune seeking? Turn around and tell your master he isn’t getting out of bed.”
The king figures out by Elijah’s fashion who it is and sends 50 men plus a captain to Elijah to do the obvious. If he wanted to chat he could have sent a messenger not a platoon. You’d think maybe 2 or 3 would be sufficient to get the old guy. He was spry enough to run before Ahab’s chariot but he’s older now. There’s the god thing. 50 should do it.
Then the toasting starts. Fire from heaven and the soldiers are gone.
round 2, same outcome
Round 3, the captain wises up and doesn’t presume any amount is enough. What protection do they have from fire from heaven? He respects God and the man of God and expresses his need. He’s between God and the king and he figures out he’s actually got a better chance talking to God than explaining to the king why he doesn’t want to get roasted.
Elijah goes with him and basically delivers the same message he gave to the original messengers, and it happens like Elijah says. End of story. Brother becomes king.
I wish I had more history of interpretation on this passage. My Ancient commentary has one church father that seems to relish blaming Jezebel for all of it because she made Ahab and his sons her slave. Modern readers have modern problems with this.
1. It makes God look bad for toasting 102 guys following orders.
2. The fire from heaven part makes others suspect it to be a legend. The spirit of Thomas Jefferson remains with us, even if we don’t believe in ghosts.
You can actually have a lot of fun with a passage like this if you work a bit harder at it.
1. Building codes. The palace in Samaria was clearly substandard. Modern building codes would have prevented the fall allowing Ahaziah to go about his pagan ways all he wanted to.
2. Ahaziah was a klutz. Clumsy people die all the time in bathrooms and national parks. Blame God for gravity?
3. Was Ahaziah looking for healing or just information? Probably whatever he felt he could get.
NT Wright on Phil Vischer
GENDER-FLUID WORLD
Sir, The articles by Clare Foges (“Gender-fluid world is muddling young minds”, July 27) and Hugo Rifkind (“Social media is making gender meaningless”, Aug 1), and the letters about children wanting to be pandas (July 29), dogs or mermaids (Aug 1), show that the confusion about gender identity is a modern, and now internet-fuelled, form of the ancient philosophy of Gnosticism. The Gnostic, one who “knows”, has discovered the secret of “who I really am”, behind the deceptive outward appearance (in Rifkind’s apt phrase, the “ungainly, boring, fleshy one”). This involves denying the goodness, or even the ultimate reality, of the natural world. Nature, however, tends to strike back, with the likely victims in this case being vulnerable and impressionable youngsters who, as confused adults, will pay the price for their elders’ fashionable fantasies.
The Right Rev Professor Tom Wright
St Mary’s College, St Andrews