Category Archives: education

the loss of the university

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I watched Prague the other night, a Danish film from 2006. Beautifully evocative of the Czech Republic as Kundera writes of it, where the totalitarian past broods over the present like a drab sky, the film studies a number of relationships between people who have difficulty connecting. In the subplot, the protagonist, Christoffer, and a young woman he finds living in a house he has inherited, attempt to converse. He speaks English, hoping she will understand, but she knows only Czech. Their conversations begin in absurdity but progress somewhat beyond it into a common moral understanding that I’ll not detail—you should see the film. I bring it up because it dramatizes conversation lacking a common tongue, and that seems to me to describe the contemporary conversations about university life with which I am most familiar.

As Wendell Berry puts it, in his famous essay “The Loss of the University”:

That the common tongue should become the exclusive specialty of a department in a university is . . . a tragedy, and not just for the university and its worldly place; it is a tragedy for the common tongue. It means that the common tongue, so far as the university is concerned, ceases to be the common tongue; it becomes merely one tongue within a confusion of tongues. Our language and literature cease to be seen as occurring in the world, and begin to be seen as occurring within their university department and within themselves. Literature ceases to be the meeting ground of all readers of the common tongue and becomes only the occasion of a deafening clatter about literature. Teachers and students read the great songs and stories to learn about them, not to learn from them. The texts are tracked as by the passing of an army of ants, but the power of songs and stories to affect life is still little acknowledged, apparently because it is little felt.1

For the past five years I’ve had the privilege of teaching an honors seminar called Great books. It isn’t a traditional “Great Books” course; if I tried that I’d face the fact that my students had already read and digested most of the books on the syllabus before, some of them in high school. That wouldn’t necessarily be bad, but it would make of the class a different kind of work from the work my predecessor (who created the course and managed it differently from the way I do) and I, have thought the course should enable. I stress the fact that my predecessor and I agree about ends, differing only as to means and that partly—my predecessor assigned modern books, and I do the same.

Here’s a link to my syllabus. I’m aware of several arguments I might have with colleagues and students about whether these books are “great,” but these don’t seem fruitful to me. I choose books I think have something to teach about the moral and spiritual universe we inhabit as humans in the twenty-first century, and not as a secondary thing, have an ability to suggest connections between thoughts and other thoughts, between thought and the world. I ought, therefore, to have strong beliefs about the American university tradition of liberal education—and indeed I do have such beliefs. I think I continue to use the Great Books appellation for my course because the Great Books idea opposes itself to literary criticism, Berry’s buzz of talk about books. Still, much of Berry’s essay makes me uncomfortable.

Start with the common tongue. Western scholarship hasn’t had a common tongue since the death of Latin. Francis Bacon revised and Latinized his 1605 Advancement of Learning in 1623 as De Augmentis Scientiarum, writing for the ages; but learning had already begun to fragment into vernacular disciplines in Bacon’s lifetime. And as for today, a colleague reminded me recently that since universities became multiversities in the last century it no longer makes any sense to speak of any university as possessing a faculty. What we have is a collection of faculties who mostly don’t talk with each other and compete, not always politely, for resources and prestige—indeed most university departments are rife with faction. And none of this reflects the so-called incommensurability of academic disciplines that became a cliché of the learning industry in the nineteen nineties. Behind it is ordinary human mendacity, the reality expressed in the truism sometimes attributed to Henry Kissinger that adademic disputes are as vicious as they are because the rewards are so small. I ought to agree with Berry’s lament for the common tongue, but I mostly don’t.

The latest addition to my book collection is a copy the 1975 Princeton edition of Constantine Cavafy’s Collected Poems. It’s a dual language edition. I love dual language editions when I can read the translation and the translated together. I can do that with German and some other modern languages. I’m not up to modern Greek, though I searched for a copy of this particular edition of the Keeley and Sherrard translations of Cavafy because I like some of the poems in this edition better than I like the translations of the same poems that appear in the 1992 revised edition. My real point is that we live in an age of translation, and that’s not anything new. We live in an age of translation because printed books made possible the common reader, made me possible. And that process was well underway in Francis Bacon’s time. One of Bacon’s contemporaries was John Florio, whose translations of the Essais served as my introduction to Montaigne when I was a college sophomore. It makes more sense to me to say that universities are engaged in a work of translation than to speak of professing in a common tongue.

I’ve said that printed books made me possible as a common reader. I should add that printed books have enabled my particular set of tastes and prejudices, my interpretive frame, as well. Deconstruction has made me suspicious of such frames and points to a difficulty that is not resolved simply by a dialectic of the sort I desire for my class at best, where individual views are subject to correction by other individual views. A dictum of Cardinal Newman’s may perhaps indicate why.

Few indeed there are who can dispense with the stimulus and support of instructors, or will do any thing at all, if left to themselves. And fewer still (though such great minds are to be found), who will not, from such unassisted attempts, contract a self-reliance and a self-esteem, which are not only moral evils, but serious hindrances to the attainment of truth. And next to none, perhaps, or none, who will not be reminded from time to time of the disadvantage under which they lie, by their imperfect grounding, by the breaks, deficiencies, and irregularities of their knowledge, by the eccentricity of opinion and the confusion of principle which they exhibit.2

While I should like to second Newman’s endorsement of instructors, I’ve cited this passage mainly in order to illustrate what it seems to presuppose: namely that the university is a sort of encyclopedia of received knowledge, the common tongue again. In Newman’s view, universities exist to diffuse and extend knowledge rather than advance the same. As he avers in the preface to The Idea of a University, “If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students.” Newman didn’t understand science or entirely approve of it, albeit he pays considerable lip service to science in The Idea of a University.3 But the terms he articulated for peace between science and theology at Dublin in 1854 leave no room for the intellectual ferment that would take place in British universities a mere generation later, as students like the young Alfred North Whitehead of Cambridge were reading and reacting to continental thinkers.4

As co-author of the modern Principia Mathematica, Whitehead could cite personal experience for his claim in later years, in a lecture that came to be printed as the epilogue to Modes of Thought, that “[t]he task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue. The future is big with every possibility of achievement and of tragedy.”5How very different from Newman! Whitehead was one of the inventors of the modern research university, one of the great progressive institutions of the last century, a commonwealth in whose environs every entity from the teaching hospital to the department of classics could be thought to serve enlightenment, the expansion of knowledge and human liberty, and the relief of suffering. A healthy set of connections seemed to exist between universities and the world of work. In the latter decades of the last century universities became loci of social adjustments which not only advanced the aspirations of women and minorities but also enlarged our conception of the world and changed much of what universities, themselves, profess. The university, as a cultural entity, has been one of the large creative engines of modern life, and that’s what we stand to lose if present trends continue.

For universities are now in trouble, indeed. Somebody or other writes an op-ed or a magazine piece attacking academic tenure fairly regularly these days.6 There are several new books out defending the humanities,7 which are everywhere being marginalized, and/or indicting administrators and administrative systems that are re-shaping universities on corporate business models. Most of my friends who are still teaching are not having any fun, and the future looks bleak to many young academics. Stanley Fish, hardly a nostalgic defender of the academic past, reacted to a number of reader comments to posts about Academe on his “Opinionator” blog last year. Here’s how he sums them up. “The perspectives represented were various, but they converged on a single judgment: the academic world is marked by venality, pretension, irresponsibility and risible claims . . . . [T]he comments I received come from readers of all political persuasions and from both inside and outside the academic world, about which almost no one had a good thing to say.”

Present day universities seem to have lost sight of their mission. At worst they seem to be characterized by faculties who disdain teaching and consider that their “work” is research (much of which doesn’t deserve the name), by research enterprises whose integrity is being progressively corrupted and eroded by corporate funding, by students who consider that their “work” consists of binge drinking, date rape, and plagiarism, and by administrations whose concern is chiefly with bottom lines, exploitation of student athletes, and the latest US News rankings. Most academic optimists, and some pessimists as well, at least in America, seem to think that reform can be achieved by some sort of cultural reaffirmation of the historic purposes of the modern liberal university. That seems an exercise in futility in our present profoundly anti-intellectual circumstances. When Berry wrote “The Loss of the University” he could still (in 1984) call for such a thing, but he has more recently achieved notoriety by taking his books and papers back from the University of Kentucky to protest its present administration’s leadership.8 Narratives of historical decline are generally odious, but I’m thinking American universities may be in a decadent phase. Academic freedom is all but lost. Formerly great public universities, like Kentucky, seem to be sliding into the near criminality that characterizes the worst for-profit corporations. It’s a situation that ought to embarrass us as Americans, and the saddest thing is that it doesn’t.

I may quit teaching after this year. As an adjunct I have no power, though I’ve never needed any. I love the work and my students, and I’ve always thought I’d continue as long as my mental faculties remained intact. But I’m beginning to think perhaps I should stop while I still have some respect for what I have done with most of my life—to say goodbye, as Cavafy wrote in a poem I love, to the Alexandria I am losing.

Notes

1Wendell Berry, Home Economics, Counterpoint (Berkekey, CA, 1987) 79.
2See the online Newman Reader, The Idea of a University, Discourse 6, section 10.
3See his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent as well as the relevant sections the Idea of a University, especially Part 2, sections 7 and 8.
4See Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Johns Hopkins UP (Baltimore, MD, 1985) 91-145.
5Modes of Thought, Free Press (New York, 1968) 171.
6Such as this one: Megan McArdle, “Tenure: An Idea Whose Time Has Gone,” Atlantic, July 21, 2010.
7For example, see Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Twilight of the Humanities in the Corporate University, Fordham UP (New York, 2008), Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, Norton (New York, 2010), and Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton UP (Princeton, NJ, 2010).
8See Cheryl Truman, “Wendell Berry pulling his personal papers from UK,” Lexington Herald-Leader, June 23, 2010.

more godspeak . . .

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Religion editor Lisa Miller’s essay in this week’s Newsweek, combatively entitled “Harvard’s Crisis of Faith” troubles me. One can easily grant her point (not actually hers but Louis Menand’s) that Harvard ought to provide undergraduates with a serious opportunity to study present-day religious discourse, especially now when “conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians; between Christians, Muslims, and animists in Africa; between religious conservatives and progressives at home over abortion and gay marriage—all . . . relate, if indirectly, to what rival groups believe about God and scripture.” One can even grant her subsidiary argument that it’s a pity “for Harvard, its students, and the rest of us who need leaders better informed about faith and the motivations of the faithful” if the university fails to do these things.

However, it’s by no means clear to me (and certainly not clear from Miller’s essay) that Harvard indeed doesn’t do these things. Sociology, history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, and other disciplines, each and all, might contribute to understanding of the cited concerns. But that seems not to be the issue. Whilst reporting on Harvard’s debates about a proposed undergraduate requirement entitled Reason and Faith, Miller notes with disapproval that Harvard has neither an undergraduate religion department which can hire and fire and grant tenure, nor a specific religion requirement, but rather relegates religious study to an interdisciplinary program some faculty seem to regard as an academic poor relation or to the divinity school where students “can take graduate-level courses about belief from people who are, by tradition, believers.” She then notes, simplistically, that “This separation of ‘faith’ from ‘reason’ occurred in the early part of the 19th century, when the American university evolved into a secular place,” and concludes:

Even now, in an era when a presidential candidate cannot get elected without a convincing “faith narrative,” the scholars who study belief continue to reside in the Divinity School [at Harvard], and when the subject of religion comes up, the scholars on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences sniff at its seriousness.

 

It’s a curious position for a Jewish writer, given Judaism’s historic emphasis on practice, but the target of Miller’s critique is unbelief. Not only that, she makes the frightening claim that today’s global conflicts legitimate religious faith. She seems, as in another Newsweek piece, “Faith in love” to occupy a positon somewhat like that of an Israeli friend who advised her, “This is the new world . . . . Deal with it,” in which rhetorical zingers acquire truth in proportion to their effectiveness as weapons. And again and again, she seems to stick a rhetorical thumb in the eye of skeptical readers like me, gloating “Deal with it” when we squirm.

“Harvard may or may not be the pinnacle of higher learning in the world,” Miller solemnly intones,

but because it is Harvard, it reflects—for better or worse—the priorities of the nation’s intellectual set. To decline to grapple head-on with the role of religion in a liberal-arts education, even as debates over faith and reason rage on blogs, and as publishers churn out books defending and attacking religious belief, is at best timid and at worst self-defeating.

The priorities of the nation’s intellectual set? To study religious discourse in any respectable department of religion (as opposed to, say, talking about religion at a cocktail party) is not, as Miller supposes, to toss rival truth claims about in a Proufrockian fog. Moreover, it’s one thing to argue, as Menand does in The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, the book Miller takes as her starting point, that “college is a time to ‘unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what’s going on beneath and behind appearances'” and quite another to claim in the next sentence, as Miller does, that “[f]orcing kids to grapple head-on with the world view of a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist, . . . would be a part of this unsettling.”

“Harvard faculty cannot cope with religion,” Miller announces in her second paragraph. Regardless of what Menand may have meant in championing the proposed Reason and Faith requirement, it’s clearly not religious assumptions that Miller believes should be unsettled at Harvard but rather what she characterizes as secular fundamentalism, something she seems to identify with the Harvard establishment and particularly with Professor Steven Pinker, who opposed the Faith and Reason course. “In Pinker’s view,” says Miller, “human progress is an evolution away from superstition, witchcraft, and idol worship—that is, religion—and toward something like a Scandinavian austerity and secularism. (Pinker is one of those intellectuals who speak frequently about how sensible things are in Europe; one suppresses the urge to remind him of the Muslim riots in the Paris and London suburbs).”

 

Ad hominem arguments are odious, but Miller has made her own religious practice into something of a cause, portraying her adult reaffirmation of Judaism and raising her daughter as an observant Jew (who also conveniently celebrates her father’s diverse background) as part of an approach to life that celebrates everything.

Our Jewish daughter knows about her Jewish heritage and can say the Shema. She also knows that she comes from generations of French and Irish Catholics, and WASPs, and Native Americans on her father’s side. She’s obsessed with the statue of the Virgin Mary in the garden of the church down the street. She believes in Santa and we celebrate Christmas — with a tree, and lights, and bright green cookies made of Rice Krispies.

In another sentence Miller admits that the exclusivity of Judaism troubles her but seems to dismiss that concern as she affirms the value of a serious cultural grounding.

Only in marrying a non-Jew did I become aware of how much of the Jewish story one learns by osmosis. Without two Jewish parents, my child would not absorb these stories automatically. We would have to teach them to her.

And so we joined the Temple. My daughter and I go, every Saturday morning. Together, we’re learning the prayers. My husband supports us, though he rarely joins — partially because he’s ambivalent about God, and partially because this is not his tradition and he feels like a foreigner there.

Why, one might ask, does Miller’s faith take precedence over her husband’s unfaith. I think perhaps because whatever she believes about God she passionately believes in a kind of religious entitlement. As she puts it more or less directly, “If my husband and I were of different races rather than different religious backgrounds, our daughter would no more be able to ‘choose’ her identity than she would the color of our skin.”

Of course a child with parents of “two different races” must perforce “choose” an identity—we now can cite the life and experience of the President of the United States as a case in point. And, one might argue, Miller’s daughter will in her turn have to choose, in spite of her mother’s protectiveness. No less, the Harvard student Miller quotes as part of her final anecdote in “Harvard’s Crisis of Faith.”

On one of my visits to the Yard, I met a sophomore named Ryan Mahoney in a basement pub. Raised in Queens, N.Y., and educated, as generations of Irish Catholics have been, by Jesuits who saw in him some promise, Mahoney was forthright about a despondent feeling he had, in class and among his friends: neither the Catholic theology that framed his thinking nor the religious community that gave him comfort were appropriate subjects for discussion. He once overheard students in the dorm making fun of his rosary. “I do not think there would be any openness to discussing God in any of the classes I took last year,” he said. “But acknowledging the fact that religion exists and that it’s not lunacy to believe in God would be helpful.”

So much for unsettling presumptions and defamiliarizing the familiar. Miller tags this story with the observation (her last word) that “[t]o dismiss the importance of the study of faith—especially now—out of academic narrow-mindedness is less than unhelpful. It’s unreasonable.” By “the study of faith” Miller seems to envision some sort of sensitivity training in a safe zone where religious beliefs and practices constitute protected areas of individual identity and are therefore not legitimate objects of criticism. This might be a good thing, but it isn’t the critical study of religion Miller affects to admire—“Fluency in religious history and texts, in fact, is the sharpest weapon against fundamentalism, as Sam Harris demonstrates in his polemic The End of Faith.”—and it belongs in the Hillel Yeshiva or the Canterbury House or the Baptist Student Union or the Islamic Center, not in the classroom. Miller’s readers get the point. As one of them puts it,

It is outrageous that a Catholic student should be ridiculed by other students for his Rosary. I bet those same students would not make fun of a Muslim student in a hijab. That would not be politically correct now, would it? The Catholic student should transfer to a Catholic college/university. Harvard is so overrated.

 

I greatly admire the work of Louis Menand, and I support the now familiar trend that seeks to infuse present day undergraduate education with a new emphasis upon citizenship. To that extent I am in sympathy with Miller. And to be fair I should admit that the movement of my own mind over many years has been away from faith. Both my commitment to secular humanism and my commitment to Christianity are cultural, but the humanist commitment is deeper because it is a product of my adult experience. I think a systematic interrogation of religious faith and practice (indeed of all ideology) ought to be part of undergraduate education, as it was part of my own. I don’t think simplistic claims that universities insult the pious serve any useful purpose.

And I think Miller’s primary point is that Harvard disrespects religion; albeit that’s an argument worthy of somebody like Brit Hume or Sarah Palin. Miller has defended Hume in another column, in which she also defends Christian proselytizing—”I’m not at all sure why the liberal left is always so shocked that evangelical Christians want other people to become Christians.” There is secular bigotry just as there is religious bigotry. Miller’s own critical perspective reflects neither; it is sharply political at best. But it is sloppy and impressionistic at worst. Harvard students don’t need to study religion as an exercise in identity politics. Still less do they need to study religion because supposedly religious controversies are all the rage in popular culture.

In the final analysis we all choose and do not choose our identities. And in the final analysis the old-fashioned positivist tradition, which seems to have won the day at Harvard for the present, “isn’t the only—or even always the best—tool for understanding human experience,” as Miller puts it. I agree with Miller (and Menand) that undergraduates should “engage fully with the messiness and contradiction of clashing ideas.” The Harvard argument over Reason and Faith exhibits just such a messiness, and it isn’t a bad messiness. Actually, it’s normal. Miller might have pointed that out, instead of trying to score cheap points in a tired culture war whose only remaining antagonists are people like Hume, Palin, and maybe David Horowitz.

puerile supremes guffaw about strip search

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I am amazed and very seriously troubled by the language and tenor of arguments at the United States Supreme Court in the case of Safford Unified School District v. Redding. I am also outraged at the tone of the reporting of this language by New York Times writer Adam Liptak.

This is the case of Savana Redding, who was strip searched by school officials in Safford, Arizona, looking for an ibuprofen pill and acting on a “tip” from another student. Redding was 13 and in the eighth grade at the time. Both male and female school officials participated in the search, which found no ibuprofen or any other “controlled substance.”

Here is Liptak’s lead:

The United States Supreme Court spent an hour on Tuesday debating what middle school students are apt to put in their underwear and what should be done about it.

After that it’s all downhill. Liptak reports with apparent relish comments from the justices which are vulgar, voyeuristic, and offensive. Apparently, even Redding’s attorney participated in the verbal undressing of his client, commenting at one point that “there’s a certain ick factor to this.”

At another point, compounding the “ick factor,” Justice Breyer offered the following profundity:

In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, . . . We changed for gym, O.K.? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.

After which, according to Liptak, “The courtroom rocked with laughter, and the justice grew a little flustered at having apparently misspoken.”

According to Liptak, “While Supreme Court arguments can often be bone-dry exercises in statutory exegesis and doctrinal refinement, Tuesday’s session was grounded in vivid facts: school snitches, drugs, underwear and body cavities.” At one point, Justice Roberts exclaimed, “The issue here covers the brassiere as well, which doesn’t seem as outlandish as the underpants.” Later, Justice Scalia, with his usual profound confidence, asserted:

You search in the student’s pack, you search the student’s outer garments, and you have a reasonable suspicion that the student has drugs. . . . Don’t you have, after conducting all these other searches, a reasonable suspicion that she has drugs in her underpants . . . ? You’ve searched everywhere else. . . . By God, the drugs must be in her underpants.

This might be funny, if it weren’t so awful. And nowhere in this discourse, not from the attorney for the plaintiff, nor from the federal attorneys arguing as friends of the court, nor from the justices (except for Justice Ginsburg), nor from the reporter, is there any recognition of the obscenity of the violation of this young woman’s privacy, her body, and her person by mindless school officials mindlessly enforcing a mindless zero-tolerance policy.

I’m surprised that Liptak didn’t report Justice Ginsburg’s remarks critical of the strip search, as several bloggers have done. Indeed, Liptak seems eager to join in the boys’ club atmosphere he describes. One blogger notes that

After [Justice] Breyer wondered aloud just “how bad” the search really was, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg interrupted energetically to underscore how bad it was. She said Redding and another student in the case weren’t just told to strip to their underwear. “They were asked to shake their bras out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out.”

The same blogger remarks ruefully that “Ginsburg has said more than once that she feels lonely on the Court as the only woman;” and adds that “this must have been one moment when that loneliness was acute.”

According to Liptak, the court’s mood was summed up when Justice Souter remarked as follows, “My thought process, . . . is I would rather have the kid embarrassed by a strip search, if we can’t find anything short of that, than to have some other kids dead because the stuff is distributed at lunchtime and things go awry.” Begging the court and the reporter’s pardon, the insensitivity of this remark is worse than appalling, it is a dishonest appeal to a false choice, and worse still: it is an off-the-rack cliché. It reflects nobody’s actual thinking. It is intellectual junk.

And apparently no thought on anybody’s part, either, that the events at issue occurred in a school, or any concern about what such scenarios teach. Here’s what they teach — that the people who have the power in life can do anything they want to you, and you have no recourse. They teach that to young vulnerable teenagers. I’m glad Savana Redding is fighting back. I hope she wins. I would have no objection to a little jail time for the school officials who molested her.

But if the language of the majority of the justices here noted is an indication of the seriousness with which this case will be adjudicated, I don’t have much hope.

snakes may safely graze

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No spiel promised: A caller from the democratic congressional hoo-ha, just now, promised “no spiel,” then cozied up with a couple of comments designed to make me feel part of the in-group, I guess, and wound up by suggesting that I contribute $209 to the cause of keeping the congress Democratic. Myomy! I’d have been more inclined not to hang up if the leaders of my party, Pelosi, Reed, Feinstein, etc., would rein in their egos and get to work.

Rick Warren: Beating a horse that perhaps ought to be dead, I intend to listen very carefully to Rick Warren’s prayer on inauguration day. I don’t like Warren, don’t like religion hucksters generally–from Joyce Meyer to Deepak Chopra. And I think my guy could have chosen any number of better people to deliver the invocation before he, himself, delivers the most important speech of his career thusfar. Nor do I think the choice is clarified by the claim that we have to listen to folks with whom we disagree. But what the hell–this is America, God love us:

in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

No child left: Two interesting pieces in today’s Washington Post (here and here) tell an ironic tale about education in the land of the free. The Shrub of legacy-seeking touts his putative achievements in the realm of education reform whilst a political pressure group lobbies a DC area school system for lower grading standards, complaining that “students [are] at a disadvantage when they seek college admission or scholarships.” I’m remembering a Czech graduate student who worked for me back in the last century. She told me one day that she was grateful to have come to the United States for graduate school because education in her country consisted of “dictionary learning” only; whereas she found herself surrounded by intellectual stimulation and creativity at our large, public, provincial, American university. That’s what we stand to lose by the pursuit of education as measurement and measuring up, what Jill Ker Conway found at Harvard in the ’50s and details in her book, True North (1994). My guy got a very good education that also included Harvard. His education secretary-in-waiting notwithstanding, I very much hope he doesn’t sign on to the Nicklebee ideology.

All we like sheep: As part of my holiday reading binge, which is by no means done yet, I read last week a wonderful little book entitled Three Bags Full (2005), characterized by author Leonie Swann as “A Sheep Detective Story.” It reminded me that The Good Shepherd remains a powerful a myth of leadership, and rightly so. A classical evocation of the myth (designed to do honor to a secular prince and not to God as is sometimes thought) occurs in Bach’s hunt cantata, #208. Everyone knows the tune, but it isn’t every day one gets to hear it performed by authentic sheep. Read through the comment thread attached to this lovely performance of “Schafe können sicher weiden.”