Killing Trees, Burning Fossil Fuels

Making booklets, cheap energy for the poor, Epiphany, and recommended articles on Hauerwas and Pope Benedict

Reading Long Articles

• If you are someone who avoids reading long articles online or dreads losing their place in the endless scroll, you should consider turning that internet tome into a physical booklet. Microsoft Word and many other applications support a booklet print setting (there’s a how-to guide available here), even if your printer can’t automatically print double-sided.

• Try copying and pasting the article into a Word doc and then formatting it there so that you can set the text size to a level conducive for reading.

• While it will kill a lot of trees, studies across the board show that reading retention is better with paper than a device, and it’s also easier on your eyes. If you’re going to take the time to read something that long, why not do it well?

  • (I’m putting this at the top of this post, as there will be plenty of opportunities to try it out on article recommendations below.)

Drill, Baby, Drill!

• I’m in World today, making the case for helping the poor by keeping energy prices low. Reinhold Niebuhr warned that the idealists (or as he called them: the “Children of Light”) are dangerous because of their naïve solutions. They “imagine that we can destroy evil merely by avowing ideals” and lack the humility to recognize the unintended consequences they might wreak. Environmental and energy policy in the United States has been driven far too often by zealous Children of Light, heedless of their policies’ impacts on the poorest.

• “A Permanent Policy of Higher Prices?” by John Shelton

  • While the average household spends about seven percent of its income on utility bills, the poorest households spend almost three times that—nearly one-fifth of their income just to keep the power on and their homes heated. That’s not even counting the amount paid for gasoline: the average American pays seven percent of his income topping off his vehicle, and other studies show that those making less than the national average spend up to twice as much a share of their annual budget on gasoline as those making $200,000 or more.

Christmastide Is (Finally) Over

• It is not that complicated: it is wrong to take your Christmas tree down before Christmas is over. But most people don’t realize that Christmas runs for 12 days (even though there’s a whole song dedicated to the fact that the same people love).

• Christmas ends on January 5th, the Twelfth Night (the namesake of one of Shakespeare’s plays), which is the beginning of Epiphany (or Three Kings Day), on which Christians celebrate the visitation of the Magi (see Matthew 2).

  • If you’ve never read it, you should consider tackling Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur. The first eighth of the book is one of the best dramatizations of Epiphany you will ever find. Film adaptations can’t match the textual excitement of great eastern civilizations converging in Balthazar, Melchior, and Caspar.

• Christmas tradition holds that you should take down your tree and decorations on the 5th (Epiphany Eve) or, failing that, you are supposed to wait all the way until the end of the Epiphany season in February (known as Candlemas) to remove your tree.

  • The latter half of that is hardcore traditional mode. But if we could get more people keeping their decorations up until the fifth it would be a major victory!

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Interesting Reads:

• “For God, Not Country: The un-American theology of Stanley Hauerwas” by Mark Oppenheimer

  • While I like to think that my Mere Orthodoxy piece, “Stanley Hauerwas: Modern American Puddleglum” does a pretty good job at familiarizing the uninitiated to Hauerwas’ ideas, I recently discovered a 2001 essay from Lingua Franca that captures the feel of the rougher side of his personality and presence like nothing else I’ve read.

    • “Hauerwas sits in his office at the Duke Divinity School, which, like Hauerwas, is at least nominally Methodist. He is surrounded by walls of books, and he wears a green shirt with a Nautica crest and a tie covered in psychedelic animals. I'm hoping to learn the origins of his Christian pacifism. Or to discover if it's true that he once said divorced people shouldn't be buried in Christian cemeteries. Or to hear about the time he scandalized the world of theology by saying "g-dd-mn" in a Newsweek article. (Hauerwas defends himself: "I was the only one in the article who mentioned God, and I did it twice!")”

• “In Memoriam: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI” by Luke Stamps

  • More Protestants (and Catholics, for that matter) should be reading Benedict. His three-volume Jesus of Nazareth is a modern classic and does not feel all that different from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. Anyone who dies with “Lord, I love you” on his lips has my seal of approval.

    • On the cardinal doctrines of the faith—the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and so on—Protestants will find little to disagree with in Ratzinger’s works. On many of the social and ethical issues of the day—marriage, life, the Christian heritage of the West, the objectivity of truth, and so on—Protestants will find a loyal ally in Ratzinger.

  • Ross Douthat’s reflections (“The First Afterlife of Pope Benedict XVI” are also worth reading (when isn’t that true?):

    • All we can say from his strange years as pope emeritus is that the way that Pope Benedict XVI sought to govern the church, to hold it together institutionally and theologically, has been challenged and partly reversed. But Joseph Ratzinger the scholar and theologian and writer, Joseph Ratzinger the champion of a certain idea of Catholic Christianity — well, he has only just begun to fight.