Loathed By the Right People

The King's College, the wonderful academic institution where it is my unmixed pleasure to teach, has made it to #2 on a left wing loath-list.

ThinkProgress has alerted the world to the five most scandalously conservative schools in the country. The King's College is #2 on the list.

I see that my work is paying off.

No Great Gain without Failure

My colleague in the King's College business department, Brian Brenberg, recently published this great little piece on the First Things website: "Why We Need Failure."

Here's a taste:

Winston Churchill probably hated every one of the bumps that made his life’s road so inspiring. But he also knew that winning and losing are inseparable. “Success,” he said, “is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” It’s not fun to fail, but it’s inevitable. Try as we might, we can’t get rid of failure in our lives unless we all agree to never get out of bed (and even that’s not without risk). The sooner you get used to dealing with things going wrong, the sooner you can get on with the business of finding ways to make things go right.

It is interesting to read the unqualified disaversion to failure in some of the comments on the article. Yes, some of our lives include terrible tragedy. That's not what Brenberg has in mind. ("So you say your three years old has eye cancer. Well, pick yourself up and learn from it!" Not the point.) Where do the complainers look for support? "Muscular unions." Where do they not look? There is not a word about God's loving providence.

Prompted by Brenberg's article, I offer my own reflections on failure and success at WORLDmag.com in "The Failures Behind American Success."

Brian Brenberg is assistant professor of business and economics at The King’s College in New York City. He holds degrees in public administration and in business from Harvard University.

Anthony Bradley on Beck

Anthony Bradley, my colleague at The King's College, was on the Glenn Beck Show yesterday explaining black liberation theology.

Beck takes most of the almost 18 minutes to talk about Marxism, BLT, and the gospel (more or less). Well, it's his show, right? Dr. Bradley comes in via satellite at the end.

Anthony Bradley's book is Liberating Black Theology (Crossway, 2010).



This is not Dr. Bradley's first time on Beck. Here he is in March 2008 just after the Jeremiah Wright eruption.




Here is Marvin Olasky interviewing Anthony Bradley when he was a visiting professor at the college.






You should also read Bradley's column today in WORLDmag.com, "Why Black Liberation Theology Fails."

Fashion, Faith, and the Turkish Future

The King's College in New York City sends students each year on international ventures of various sorts to engage students and political leaders on the truth and importance of liberty--spiritual, political, and economic. We have sent teams to Albania, Bulgaria, and Uganda. This May, Jane Clark joined the Turkey Venture. She published this report yesterday on the politics of headscarves there in National Review Online.

Many Turkish college students oppose repealing the ban because they believe that their fellow students want to wear the headscarf as a political statement, rather than from religious conviction. A female student from Bogazici University in Istanbul recently told me she believes the government shouldn’t cater to the scarf wearers: “For some of them the headscarf is just a trend. You can tell by the way they tie the scarves. It doesn’t represent religious conviction for many of them.”

Erol Aslan Cebeci, an AK member of parliament, concurs with those who believe religion should not be a factor in politics. Though personally a devout Muslim, Cebeci says that his religious beliefs should not affect his work. However, he does not see the repeal of the headscarf ban as a religious statement by the government. Instead, he sees it as expanding freedom of religious expression in society.

Cebeci’s argument is counterintuitive for many European secularists: He believes that loosening religious restrictions leads to stronger political secularism. But he points out that there is more than one kind of secularism: “There is American/Anglo-Saxon secularism and French secularism.” American secularism is religiously neutral. French secularism (laïcité) allows the government to control how civilians practice their religion. Since 2004, students in French public schools have been forbidden to wear “ostentatious” religious symbols — including headscarves, but also yarmulkes and oversized crosses.

Cebeci believes that American secularism is the desired model. The question before the Turkish court system is much more than whether women can cover their heads. It is whether to follow the pattern of French liberalism or American liberalism.

Read the whole thing: "Turkey, the Headscarf, and Secularism."

Grilling Kagan for Future Battles

In the Washington Times today, my colleague, David Tubbs, offers advice to the Republicans members of the Senate Judiciary Committee as the Kagan confirmation hearings get under way.

After being nominated, Ms. Kagan effusively praised Justice Stevens, remarking that the nation was "fortunate beyond all measure" to have had him on the court for 35 years. Such praise may have been prompted largely by considerations of decorum, but Republican senators should ask Ms. Kagan whether she truly holds Justice Stevens in such high regard. If her judicial views align with his, especially on matters of constitutional law, they should press her on a more fundamental issue - namely, whether those views can be reconciled with our nation's commitment to representative democracy.

Read it in, "Put Nominee on the Stevens Hot Seat."

David L. Tubbs is assistant professor of politics at The King's College in New York City. He is the author of "Freedom's Orphans: Contemporary Liberalism and the Fate of American Children" (Princeton University Press, 2007).

Bonhoeffer Biographed and Reviewed

Here is a total King's fest on the pages of The Wall Street Journal.

"Belief in Action: In Hitler's Germany, a Lutheran pastor chooses resistance and pays with his life." It is prof. Joseph Loconte's review of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Thomas Nelson, 2010) by Eric Metaxas.

Joe Loconte has been a senior lecturer at The King's College for the last couple of years and will be an assistant professor next year. He teaches Western Civ and American Foreign Policy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer himself is tied closely into King's. Our student body is divided into sub-communities called "houses," and one of the men's houses is the House of Bonhoeffer.

Eric Metaxas, the book's author, is a good friend of the college and has taught courses here in persuasive writing.

The review even includes a Bonhoeffer link to New York City: After a 1939 visit to New York's Riverside Church, a citadel of social-gospel liberalism, he wrote that he was stunned by the "self-indulgent" and "idolatrous religion" that he saw there. "I have no doubt at all that one day the storm will blow with full force on this religious hand-out," he wrote, "if God himself is still anywhere on the scene."

Joseph Loconte is the editor of The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).

Entertaining Hauerwas

 Photo: WORLD magazine

Last Thursday night Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, addressed the student body of The King's College on the subject of avarice. He was the the keynote speaker for the 2010 Interregnum, the college's annual three day recess from classes when we explore a fruitful theme and a related great book.

Stanley Hauerwas is an odd man, but the sort of oddball that is good to know. He is an Anabaptist Anglican from Texas, now living in North Carolina. He is too conservative to be acceptable to liberals (he believes the Bible and thinks sodomy is sin), but he is too liberal for the comfort of conservatives (he's a pacifist and he's married to a Methodist minister). He is pleasant company, and a stimulating thinker.

Over the course of the day with Prof. Hauerwas, between a morning conversation, a lunch discussion, the evening address, and the question and answer time that followed, I gleaned these nuggets of insight and provocation. (These are either quotations, or, more likely, fairly reliable near-quotations.) For another brief exposure to the man, you can read Marvin Olasky's 2007 interview with him, "A Playful Mind."

*****************

Evangelicals know the Bible and they know today...and nothing in between.

Evangelicals are people who have a relationship with God, and attending church worship services is just how they express that. [If you don't see the point, the joke is on you.]

We don't hear sermons on greed (which is odd given that it's such a prominent theme in the New Testament.) We know what lust looks like--but greed?

There was an increase in attention to greed by theologians after the rise of the money economy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

America can never have enough power.

America runs on fear.

We cannot imagine anything but an endlessly growing economy--that says something about our greed.

People have always been greedy, but now we have made it into a moral quality necessary for economic growth.

Whether or not we are possessed by our possessions is measured by our willingness to give it away.

We want to be forgivers, not forgiven, because we want to remain in control. Learn to accept forgiveness without regret.

If in giving alms you think you are giving what's yours, you are possessed by greed.

Greed is a deadly sin because it prevents faith.

What would New York City look like if it were shaped by the virtue of temperance?

Another name for money is loneliness.

You should not have a personal relationship with Christ. You should share him.

No monasticism? No Christianity. The Protestant rejection of it explains why we have no resistance to being bourgeois.

Jesus never worked a day as far as we know. He must have begged. We need to learn how to beg. If you get money, you must always get it as a beggar. (He meant you must view it, even as you are making it, as a gift from God, from outside of your control. But he also spoke highly of actual begging.)

American democracy is a plutocracy. ...The middle class doesn't care who rules as long as they don't lose their stuff.

Every American has a sign around his neck that says, "Notice me!" (but I don't have to notice you). It's a form of greed.

********************

I was impressed by the breadth of his learning, and the fertility of his mind. (Why should I be impressed? He's a prominent theologian of high reputation.) His discussion of the moral management of prosperity, being possessed by our possessions, the ease with which we justify and even sanctify our avarice, and the many forms this sin can take when concealed within other sins as well as within virtues like generosity was a feast for reflection. But I was struck with how injudicious his judgments were in applying his learning.

Professor Hauerwas finds greed in all human business like dust in a rug, but he uses this exposure as a basis for condemning modern life itself. Of course modernity has serious problems. That's why it spawned post-modernity. But a more sober use of his considerable research and original insights would have been to recognize what good there is in modern liberty, and then caution us against the many and subtle forms of greed for which modern life gives such historically unprecedented opportunity. It is one of the blessings of modern political and economic liberty that the sons of bricklayers, people like Hauerwas, can become great theologians. Yet, necessarily alongside that and deceived by what our hands have done, we feel we are masters of our own fortune in the making of it, the spending of it, and the giving of it away. But Hauerwas seems angry that the eschaton has not come more quickly, and he seems to blame us for the delay.


It is true that we are all too comfortable in our wealth and all too blind to our greed and the extent to which we are possessed by our possessions. Hauerwas was good at exposing the finer roots of this sin in our hearts. But he went beyond that. His condemnation of all things modern and middle class was sweeping. It was irresponsible. He tossed an intellectual hand grenade into the crowd of people's thoughts to shatter their way of thinking about work, possessions, prosperity, and giving. But he put nothing in its place. At the end of the lecture, he seemed to prepare us for "an alternative to a world shaped by greed." But then he just said something vague about Jesus. When a student pressed him for a suggestion as to how then we should live, he threw up his hands and complained that we have no idea how to live any other way, and that this itself indicates how possessed by greed we are.

At the end of the question period, he eventually suggested that instead of walking around with a sign around our necks saying "Notice me!", as he said all Americans do and which is a form of greed, in its place we should learn how to live as friends. Lovely! Aside from being a hideously unjust caricature of American life--there is a great deal of friendship and community in America, and even fellow feeling toward strangers, even in New York City!--it is an almost comically unhelpful suggestion, both institutionally and theoretically. A healthy political community will be knit together by ties of affection among people that resemble those of friendship, and the more like friendship they are (remembering that you cannot be literally "friends" with 100,000 people), the healthier the community will be. Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam's fall and New York City in the 1970s and 1980s are notorious examples of political friendship deficits. But to suggest that friendship replace the market economy, perhaps along the lines of universalized monastic life or the separatistic Anabaptist communities of rural Pennsylvania, lies somewhere between philosophical fantasy and over-realized eschatology.

If he is genuinely flummoxed over how we might organize and conduct our life together in a way that is not fundamentally avaricious, he should be much gentler in his rebukes and humbler in his accusations.

People's understanding of property has profound political implications, and gifted thinkers should be cautious in what they say about these things. One is quick to remember the degrading and bitter sting of near universal poverty before what Hauerwas reminds us was the rise of the money economy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But we should also call to mind what politics looked like at that time, i.e., how power was distributed and used. Hauerwas told us that American democracy is plutocracy--the rule of wealth--in which the middle class doesn't care who rules as long as they don't lose their stuff. But a populace of beggars and the materially indifferent would soon be once again under arbitrary government. It would soon return to the government of men in their unrestrained, unmediated greed and glorious domination, rather than the government of laws that is the limited, constitutional government of a commercial republic like ours. Yes, a commercial republic, with all its attendant spiritual pitfalls. Anyone who thinks that poverty under tyranny is the better choice because it is better for our souls should move to North Korea or Zimbabwe. They are still taking applications.

But Prof. Hauerwas was not suggesting that we revert to medieval peasant life under the indifferent hand of hereditary lords because it would free us from such culturally pervasive and institutionalized avarice. Actually, it's not clear that he wasn't. He celebrated begging. As he pointed out, the Franciscans begged. The Franciscans begged and so should we. He even claimed that we have no evidence that Jesus ever worked, so he must have begged. Thus, Christians should follow in his steps. The experience cultivates in us a recognition of our poverty and of our material dependence on God. To round out the judgment, he criticized Adam Smith for redirecting our economy, and with it our hearts, in a way that would clear the beggars from our midst. A rising tide lifts all paupers. But he says we need beggars for our sakes, i.e., to give us occasion to give. The beggars might consider that an overly selfish view, perhaps even greedy, and opt for Adam Smith. Nonetheless, there will always be helpless people among us, the disabled for example, who give us occasion to give.

Hauerwas went far beyond suggesting that Christians pick up the habit of quitting their jobs and adopting the mendicant ways of Franciscan monks. He condemned the very foundations of the modern economy. "We cannot imagine anything but an endlessly growing economy--that says something about our greed." "People have always been greedy, but now we have made it into a moral quality necessary for economic growth." But you cannot separate the modern hope of prosperity, both personal and shared, from modern economic liberty. And you cannot separate economic liberty from property rights. And you cannot separate security in one's property from security against arbitrary government, which is political liberty. To desire one without the other is like saying you want modern life, but without the invention of nuclear weapons. The one entails the other. You cannot maintain a society-wide medieval attitude toward possessions and acquisition in isolation from an otherwise modern attitude toward nature (conquerable), one another (equal politically), and political power (accountable to the people). These attitudes are all part of a civilizational package.

If Hauerwas wants all the benefits that come with widespread begging, he has to take filth, plague, crib death, famine, and oppression along with it. You cannot have the conquest of nature by science (consider penicillin) and the attitudes of personal assertion over fortune that underpin it, without also the ambitious creation of wealth by countless entrepreneurs, great and small. In other words, you cannot have Francis Bacon's New Organon without his essays "Of Riches," "Of Usury," and "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates."

It's easy to get well meaning Christians stirred up with calls for a purer heart with respect to riches. Following through on the implications of your revolutionary call for a society of friends and an economy of temperance would surely expose, however, both the impossibility and the horror of your brave new world. It would also sober your audience into considering a more temperate critique of modernity and a less monkish view of prosperity.

Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character?

Each year in April, The King's College takes a break from regular classes and focuses as an academic community on some fertile topic for exploration and reflection through a common reading, student debates, dramatized great speeches, an art exhibit, student lectures, and a formal address by a prominent academic. This year the theme (in keeping with the times) is "avarice." We had two readings: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Macbeth. Our honored speaker will be Stanley Hauerwas from Duke Divinity School tomorrow night.


I most appreciate the student lectures, however. (Forgive me my weaknesses.) One student from each of the nine "houses" by which we organize the student community at King's delivers a ten minute lecture on a commonly assigned question. Following the avarice theme, and wishing to challenge our liberty oriented Christian community, the student lead Interregnum Committee posed the question, "Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character." I was only able to hear six of the addresses, and, while they were all impressive, sophomore Tim Wainwright's stood out, in my opinion. He graciously consented to allow me to reproduce it here at Principalities and Powers.

"Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character?"

Tim Wainwright

House of C.S. Lewis, The King's College, class of 2013

The question I address today, “Does the free market corrode moral character?”, is not a new one, but it is a complex one, and because of this I feel I should start by defining my terms and my interpretation of the questions. First of all, I define “free market” not as a lawless Wild-West kind of gold nugget anarchy, but as an economic system of capitalism with minimal interference, with rule of law and clear rights of private property, and a system where people can freely exchange goods and services. Secondly, the way I interpret this question posed is “how does the free market impact people’s morality?”, as in, does the free market on average cause individual people to behave in an immoral way? Therefore, I will not be trying to persuade you of the various material benefits of free market policy and economics. Also, minimum wage laws, regulation, dead weight loss and the harm caused by nationalization of industry and other nuances will be left for another discussion. I will be trying to leave out these topics unless they pertain directly to people’s moral character.

I lay this out to you because it’s important. It means that this lecture will be more of a subjective approach than an objective one. And because I have to focus on morality rather than math, and because this is such a deep question and I only have ten minutes with which to talk about it, I will not be able to go into as much detail as I would like. Keeping those challenges in mind, I’ll now talk about some way how best to serve others by providing a superior product or making a process more efficient and seeking to market that. This creativity cannot be mandated by central economic planning. Also, do not let it seem like free-markets use a reductive definition of creativity, as simply a means to turn something of worth into cash. From a Judeo-Christian vantage point, the capacity to create is something, in the words of Austin Hill, “distinctly human, something God-given, and something indicative of the unique nature of the human person, having been “made in the image of God”. Creativity is a gift that separates man from the beasts. Birds and other animals create, but with repetition, not ingenuity. Capitalism is the economic system which allows creativity to thrive most because it provides incentives, more so than any earthly alternative.

Speaking of incentives, that brings me into my third ethical point in favor of free-market capitalism. It is the only economic system that relies upon persuasion rather than coercion. Communism, fascism, and socialism rely upon coercion: trying to get people to do what you want by threatening to reduce their options. And by “reducing options”, I mean state-sponsored murders. 65 million in China, 20 million in the USSR, the list goes on. Free-market capitalism, presupposing the freedom of exchange, that the rule of law prevents anyone from being physically forced to make a purchase, means that no trade will occur without the blessing of all parties involved, which means that by definition it is a win-win situation. That means that in order to get others to do what you want, you have to use persuasion rather than coercion. It is an environment where people have an incentive to serve others in order to serve themselves, thus actually tempering the human desire to conquer and domineer. It takes those in the economy whose motives are pure greed (and they do exist) and forces them to channel that greed into doing something useful for their fellow men, for that is the only way they can sate it. So not only does free-market capitalism sponsor certain virtues, it also channels certain vices and, while not eliminating that vice, at least preventing it, when the rule of law is upheld, from becoming something that harms the rest of society as it would under another system.

I could go on. I could say how capitalism creates responsibility, civility, cooperation, and responsibility. That it furthers knowledge, and that it helped give us modern theology in that it allowed people to take a break from farming and spend some time thinking about God. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to really unpack those topics. Instead, I will use the time I have left to answer common arguments from those who disagree with my view of the market.

I’ll begin with the most common complaint against free-market capitalism: that it is a system that rewards and fundamentally relies upon greed and selfishness. Critics who make this point are foolishly confusing selfish behavior with self interested behavior. A market system does run on self-interested behavior, but that is not necessarily greedy. What I'm doing right now, giving this lecture, is engaging in self-interested behavior. I accepted the chance to speak in front of you because I am interested in the subject matter and how it gets communicated. But it's not selfish. Selfishness can be defined as “exclusively concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others”. I’m certainly not exclusively focused on my own pleasure being here. If I were, I wouldn’t be here; I would be asleep!

And that is why it is important for us to distinguish between selfishness and self-interest. Self-interest, as defined by Paul Heyne, is “individuals in control of property using that property to pursue projects that interest them”. There is nothing inherently wrong with self-interest. Not all desire to better oneself is greed. Indeed, the Book of Proverbs says, “Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth”. There is clear biblical support for a pursuit of self-interest through hard work, and it is on this that the free market runs, not greed.

And this is where critics of capitalism get it all wrong! They make glaring assumptions about the true motives of people in the business world. What is it that business execs are thinking about in their work? When they devise a campaign or have meetings, are they only thinking about getting more money? Sometimes, but a whole lot less than we are given to think. And I would stress that the greed that does exist is a matter resulting from the human heart, not from the way the economic system is set up.

This point about the human heart is closely related to the second common argument I will refute, so I will expand it in relation to this: that the free market creates a materialistic and spiritually bankrupt consumer culture. You all know the common caricatures: of obese Americans who love nothing more than a McDonald’s and a Starbucks on every corner, who only care about getting the latest Steve Jobs toy. Or, as a Preacher named Jim Wallis put it, “The tree of the American economy is rooted in the toxic soil of unbridled materialism”. Unfortunately, this dramatic stance distorts consumption into gluttony. Gluttony involves our hearts, it is something created by human nature and not from circumstances created by private property.

St. Augustine talks about this problem of material goods, the “beautiful form of material things”. He says that “Sin can gain entrance through these and similar good things when we turn to them with immoderate desire, since they are the lowest kind of goods and we thereby turn away from the better and higher: from you yourself, O Lord our God, and your truth and your law. These lowest goods hold delights for us indeed, but no such delights as does my God, who made all things; for in him the just man finds delight, and for upright souls he himself is joy”. Isn’t that beautiful? If we unpack what Augustine says here, we learn that materialism comes from putting earthly desires before God. Sound familiar? Oh yeah, its that thing humanity has been struggling with for the last few thousand years, way before The Wealth of Nations was written. Materialism can be found in any culture, and it is something that stems from the imperfection of human hearts, not from any imperfection of the free-market. I'll summarize this point by using the words of economist and author Jay Richards, “don’t confuse the free market with the bad choices free people make”.

To sum up, far from being a system that actively corrodes people's moral character, the free-market enterprise system actually encourages virtues. Remember charity and creativity and all the rest? It also uses persuasion over coercion. And as I have shown, most of the moral arguments against capitalism come from misguided people. And this is where we get to the root of the matter, what I think is the one single most harmful false presupposition in this debate. Underpinning anti-capitalist views are, I believe, a Utopian view that society can somehow be perfected. People who criticize capitalism compare it with a perfect universe, a Nirvana. Against a perfect world, against the Kingdom of God, of course free market capitalism looks bad. So does anything else you care to name. But when you hold capitalism up against any other earthly alternative, then it stops looking so bad. As Martin Wolf said, “Those who condemn the immorality of liberal capitalism do so in comparison with a society of saints that has never existed--and never will”. Remember that the free market is only one of several imperfect, earthly ways to run an economy….but hold no doubts that it is by far the most moral, the most humane, and the most efficient of all the imperfect options available to us.



Bibliography

Scott Rae and Austin Hill, The Virtues of Capitalism: The Moral Case for Free Markets (Northfield Publishing, 2010).

Paul Heyne, "Are Economists Basically Immoral?" and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion (Liberty Fund, 2008).

Paul Heyne, The Student's Guide to Economics (ISI, 2000).

Jim Wallis, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street (Howard Books, 2010).

Susan B. Varenne, ed. Late Have I Loved Thee: Selected Writings of St. Augustine on Love (Knopf Doubleday, 2006).

Jay Richards, Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem (HarperOne, 2009).

King's Among Top Conservative Colleges

Students too often enter college knowing more about their history and form of government than when they graduate. They go into college with Christian faith and leave without it. At eighteen they are hungry for truth and wisdom, and by twenty-two they are far too sophisticated for such naive concepts.

Young America's Foundation has been publishing a list of "Top Conservative Colleges" for several years now because thoughtful and patriotic young people, along with their penny-wise parents, want to know that the college education they are about to buy will not speed out of control and a crash them into a moral and philosophical wall.

My own institution, The King's College in New York City, is on the list of fourteen. But really, if King's is not conservative, nothing is. Of course, these are not doctrinaire wing-nut factories. No one makes the list without exploring conservative principles in the context of an academically serious education. Here is what they say about King's.

The King’s College in New York City is a growing Christian college in the Empire State Building. Their 2009-2010 class added 130 new students to the mid-town Manhattan site to bring enrollment to 300.  The King’s College expects more than 200 new students in the fall for a total student body of 450 for the 2010-2011 academic year.


King’s emphasizes a core curriculum that stresses western civilization, writing, politics, philosophy, and economics. King’s graduates learn to contrast ideas based on eternal truths with trendy ideologies that come and go. They are prepared to serve in and eventually lead eight strategic institutions: government, law, business, media, the arts, civil society, education and the church.

The campus located in New York City allows for the campus art gallery to be the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the performing arts center to be Broadway, the library to be the New York Public Library, and the quad to be Central Park.  Students eat, shop, study and play in the heart of one of the world’s most influential cities. When it is time to intern, they go to places like Oppenheimer or CBS News.

The King’s College academics feature three majors: Politics, Philosophy and Economics (modeled after Oxford); Business; and Media, Culture, and the Arts.  Professors include renowned Christian and conservative authors like Anthony Bradley, Peter Kreeft, Joe Loconte, Udo Middelmann, Anne Hendershott and Marvin Olasky.  Adjunct writing professors come from the National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and World.  

All students are members of “houses,” groups of students named after greats like C.S. Lewis, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Students this past year experienced leadership first hand by building an award-winning debate team and starting a variety of student organizations.

For more information, please contact The King’s College:
The King’s College
The Office of Admissions
350 5^th Avenue, Suite 1500
New York, NY  10018
212-659-7200

Progress and Its Discontents

This semester, beginning next week, I am leading six exceptional students at The King's College in a seminar on Francis Bacon's Invention of Modern Politics. We will be exploring Lord Verulam's plan to conquer nature for the relief of our estate, the benefits that have come of it, as well as the problems inherent in it. We will look closely and critically at Bacon's writings--The Great Instuaration, New Organon, New Atlantis, Essays--and then students will research the benefits and moral complications of subsequent technological developments.

Robert Faulkner, in his penetrating work on Bacon's artful and revolutionary project to reshape and redirect Western civilization, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, expresses this sober assessment nicely: "Now it seems that a thoughtful citizen of a modern country must be prepared to defend the benefits of progress, or at least to reconsider them while being aware of the defects as well as the advantages" (p.3).

For example, consider email. Most of us depend on it because we find it useful, and so we use it all the time. But we also sense a downside. What is that disturbing impulse we feel to be constantly checking our inboxes. That's not good. John Freeman explores the complexity of the technology in his book, The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. "E-mail might be cheaper, faster and more convenient, but its virtues also make us lazier, lonelier and less articulate."

Also have a look at "Louis c.k." claiming that Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy. Warning, this is very funny, and you may see yourself in one of the "spoiled idiots" he describes.



He's entertained by the fact that conservatives and Christians find his routine resonates with what they believe. What they like is clearly the call to moderation and contentment. Louis just despises them, but that's a sign that he doesn't understand either what he's saying or the conservatives and Christians. He himself is incoherent. He meant to condemn capitalism in this routine. He explains this to Opie and Anthony. (The second clip is better than the first, but blasphemous at points.) Yet capitalism is the economic system on which he depends for his lucrative career and high flying lifestyle. He also explains that he is not against technology. He just thinks we should chasten our expectations for it and have a little more peace while using it. This thought has clearly hit a nerve with people given the video's "viral" popularity. People are uncomfortably aware that while technology is good, it affects the way we see the world in ways that are morally unhealthy. And that is a subject worthy of study.

American Socialism's Waterloo

King's student, Matthias Clock, reports on Sen. Jim DeMint's visit to The King's College and the South Carolina Senator's opposition to ObamaCare, American socialism's Waterloo.

Much of DeMint’s rhetorical firepower has been directed at Obama, who DeMint said continues to increase federal power. The senator added that we have witnessed a “bait and switch in the White House.” According to DeMint, Americans are now finding out how destructive the Obama administration will be if left unchecked. He predicted a difficult road ahead for his Republican colleagues, calling Obama’s healthcare plan “the fight of our lives.”

Read the article in the online edition of World magazine: "DeMint Defends Liberty Against Rising Socialist Threat."

God Is Back In New York

This spring, two editors from The Economist published God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (Penguin 2009). John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge distinguish themselves among their associates in the scribbling class with their appreciation for those who are restrained and directed by religious faith, especially the Christian faith.

Of particular interest to me and many readers of this blog is the special mention they give to The King's College in the conclusion.

The Empire State Building...is an embodiment of technological prowess and an icon of modern pop culture, the building where King Kong met his tragic end. Yet this icon of modernity is also home to one of America's leading seats of Evangelcial learning. King's College, which moved into the building in 1999, now occupies two floors of the skyscraper.

They quote the college President, Stan Oakes, saying,

For all the sophistication and prestige of the secular colleges, almost all of their professors traffic in spent ideas that do not work--bad ideas that have had a myriad of disasterous consequences in our generation. They are wrong about God, human nature, wealth, power, marriage, poverty, family, sex, America, liberty, peace and many other decisive issues.

They point out that The King's College is not just about great ideas, but also about the great city that the college inhabits.

Many Christians deliberately retreat from the temptations ofd the big city, attending Bible schools and Christian universities in small towns....King's College deliberately brings young Christians to the heart of the beast. ... [W]here better to train people to exercise influence on the world than the capital of the media and financial world, not to mention the home of the United Nations?

Here are reviews from The New York Times, FoxNews, The New Statesman, and the Washington Post.

TKC Grads Hit the Presses

Two recent graduates from The King's College in New York City have shown up in prominent print this week.

Anthony Randazzo (Class of 2008) published "The Myth of Financial Deregulation: Government action caused the economic crisis, not the free market" in Reason Online: Free Minds and Free Markets (June 19).

For the past nine months, Wall Street critics have painted a damning picture of the housing bubble as the product of deregulation and reduced governmental oversight. To read the Obama administration's new financial sector regulation overhaul proposal, the government didn't have anything to do with the current crisis. According to this view, our economy wouldn't be facing a recession with almost 10 percent unemployment if the government had been more involved with the market. This picture is about as historically accurate as the famous portrait Washington Crossing the Delaware. ...

The core problem of the regulatory proposal is its view of the causes of the crisis. Everything is built on a belief that the market failed and that deregulation created a system of excessive risk and irresponsibility. Ironically, it was government action that created incentives for financial firms to be less risk adverse, not a lack of regulation. As Washington prepares to debate regulatory overhaul this summer, it is more important than ever to wrestle the myth of deregulation to the ground.

Given all the talk of deregulation, you would expect to find dozens of deregulating laws put in place over the past few years. Surprisingly, there have only been three major deregulatory actions in the past 30 years. Ultimately, the data points to bad regulation as complicit in the creation of the financial crisis, not deregulation.

Those three major deregulatory actions were the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980, the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 (co-sponsored by then-Rep. Charles Schumer, as Randazzo nicely observes), and of course the 1999 Glass-Steagall Act.

Anthony Randazzo is a policy analyst for Reason Foundation. Read his Reason archive here.

David Lapp (Class of 2009) gives us "For Better or for Worse: When Marriage Vows Get Creative" on the Houses of Worship page of the Wall Street Journal (June 19). (I have previously cited Mr. Lapp in my obituary for Richard John Neuhaus for his words introducing Rev. Neuhaus at his King's College Interregnum address.)

In this custom-made vows market there is plenty of opportunity for mockery, although it is also easy to dismiss the writing of one's own wedding vows -- or farming them out to professionals -- as a harmless exercise, just another way for a couple to personalize their love for each other....

But let's imagine for a moment that, instead of reciting the oath that his 43 predecessors have taken, President Barack Obama had insisted at his inauguration on personalizing it, perhaps replacing "I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States" with the more flexible "I will try as hard as possible to do the job of president of the United States." That sounds a little more natural and honest, he might have argued: How does he know if he'll always be able to live up to his word? Besides, he might have stated, "The traditional oath is what every other president has said. I want mine to be original."

We, the people, would have been outraged -- and rightly so. The very specific words our Constitution requires the president to recite demonstrate the gravity of the obligations he assumes. They can't be reduced to the whims of one person.

Lapp draws attention to the place of marriage within a larger community, and, in a Christian context, within a covenant community. Also, he points out, he vows people write for themselves often reflect their own immaturity. The vows certainly express who they are as a couple, but they do not express who they should aspire to be, drawing on the wisdom of those who have preceded them in marriage, some of whom are present at the ceremony. "The more casual attitudes toward the vows are probably a symptom of our more casual attitude toward marriage."

I"m glad he was able to give Dietrich Bonhoeffer some spotlight, who told one couple, "it is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love." Words to the wise.

Lapp presents this practice of writing your own vows as something new. But I seem to recall that it was featured on an episode of All In The Family in the early 1970s when it became faddish. Certainly the practice of shopping for vows on the Internet is new. That reduces wedding vows to the level of a greeting card sentiment. Do people even know what a "vow" is?

So there you have it: two Christian philosophico opinion shapers for the twenty-first century.

Neuhaus at The King's College, 2007

Each spring in April, The King's College as a whole takes off three days to mull over a great theme through debates, lectures, art, a common reading, and a public address by a national figure. In 2007, our theme was "difficulty" and our speaker was Richard John Neuhaus, who died last week at the age of 72.

David Lapp, class of 2009, introduced him that night. In honor of Rev. Neuhaus's now completed life of service to Christ and with Mr. Lapp's permission, I reproduce his fitting tribute here.

Introduction for Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

The King’s College – Interregnum III

April 4, 2007

David Lapp, Scholar to the House of Lewis

Good evening and welcome to The King’s College Interregnum.

Difficulty. One certain gentleman gravely staring down at us right now knows a good deal about difficulty. If you look to your right, you’ll see a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was president during one of the most trying times for our nation. The civil war that our forefathers went through makes one wonder why, as one of the boys in the Lord of the Flies wondered why “things break up like they do.” Why do we bicker with one another, deceive one another, even kill one another? Why can’t we all just get along? And why don’t things go as we plan? We start life with grand hopes and noble dreams—but somewhere along the way we encounter the grave realization that life is difficult. If we are to live life at all, we come to realize that we live in a broken world; a messed up world. Of course, as Christians, we have the hope of redemption.
But in the meantime we live inescapably in the here and now---now, here, on 37th and Park in the Union League Club in New York City—and New York City is an opportune place for getting one hand’s dirty. Many wise people, including our speaker this evening, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, contend that getting our hands dirty is worth it.

Born in Ontario, Canada, Fr. Neuhaus was one of eight children and the son of a Lutheran minister. He would eventually become a Lutheran minister himself, pastoring a congregation in a poor, mostly black part of Brooklyn for 30 years. In the early 1980’s, he became involved with the Moral Majority, an evangelical movement initi0000000ated by Rev. Jerry Falwell, with the goal of promoting fundamentalist Christian values in government. The Moral Majority answered the need for what many Christians saw as a Christian presence in politics. Christians at that time largely shunned politics, confining themselves to the church. While Fr. Neuhaus appreciated the idea of the Moral Majority, he would come to criticize what he saw as their overt “triumphalist” approach to politics. He insisted, and continues to insist, that Christian political engagement, demands a civil conversation with opponents.

In 1990, Fr. Neuhaus converted to Catholicism, and became a priest soon after. But he certainly hasn’t shied away from discussions with Protestants since then. His commitment to our Lord’s prayer that the church “all may be one” is evident. He was one of the primary architects of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” a document signed by leading Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics in America in an effort to identify common ground in the Christian faith.
As founder and editor-in-chief of the influential religion and public policy journal, First Things, Fr. Neuhaus has been advocating for an informed Christian presence in the public square. An interreligious journal, its stated purpose is to “advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.”

His 1984 book, The Naked Public Square, was named by Christianity Today as one of the “Top 100” religious books of the 20th century. In it, he argued that secularism is a dangerous political doctrine; we need a public square that’s informed by transcendent values. In 1988, he wrote the influential The Catholic Moment: the Paradox of the Church in the Modern World while still a Lutheran pastor. So while not an evangelical, Time Magazine recently named him one of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.” ...

Those of us that attend college in the “skyscraper to heaven” have fairly lofty goals. We came to The King’s College out of a sense that God calls us “to get our hands dirty”; to redeem, not retreat. Yes, we are a fairly ambitious lot—us young aspiring statesmen, CEO’s, media execs, educators, pastors. We are the culture shakers who will change the world. But lest we’re under the illusion that we can assemble our presidential campaign team now that we’ve mastered Rhetoric, Logic, and have read Plato’s Republic, Fr. Neuhaus reminds us that we need to think very carefully about how we engage the public square. His somber and reflective writings have reminded the Christian community for decades now that Christian political and cultural engagement demands constant prayerful reflection and a circumspect civility.

In our time, the remarkable resurgence of evangelicals’ engagement in politics since the 2000 presidential election is, at least in some respects, akin to the Moral Majority movement that Fr. Neuhaus was a part of in the early 1980’s. Today, as then, there are enormous difficulties we must wrestle with as principled Christians entering the messy public square.

Pres. Lincoln’s portrait, though, reminds of the nobility of engagement. The fact that his portrait occupies such a prominent place in this Club is a testimony to the heroism of his willingness to serve his country, and the nobility of taking on the hard work of his time. But his somber look also reminds us that it came with a great deal of difficulty.

We are honored to have Fr. Neuhaus share with us his reflections on some of the particular difficulties that confront Christians today in the public square. Indeed, as one who’s spent over forty years thinking, living, and talking about what it means to be a Christian in the public square, Fr. Neuhaus has a wealth of wisdom to share with us. And we would do well to listen.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my very great honor to introduce Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.

You may read David Lapp's TKC Student Voice editorial on Neuhaus here. It is a fine reflection on the primacy of being transformed oneself before presuming to transform the world, and on the importance of adding civility to the love for truth when taking one's place in the larger cultural and political conversation.

The Kennedy and Catholic Roots of Abortion Rights

President John F. Kennedy and Pope Paul VI at the Vatican, 1963

It is no revelation that Caroline Kennedy would be a strong supporter of abortion rights in the U.S. Senate, even their most hideous mutations. But Anne Hendershott has researched the very interesting (and, for the Roman Catholic Church, unflattering) connection between the Kennedy family, a group of prominent Catholic theologians (including Robert Drinan of Boston College and Charles Curran), and the development of the abortion rights establishment in the Democratic Party ("How Support for Abortion Became Kennedy Dogma," Wall Street Journal, Jan. 1, 2009).

Ted Kennedy was on record as defending the life of the unborn in 1971. In a letter to a constituent, he wrote, "When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception." He was not alone in taking that position.

But that all changed in the early '70s, when Democratic politicians first figured out that the powerful abortion lobby could fill their campaign coffers (and attract new liberal voters). Politicians also began to realize that, despite the Catholic Church's teachings to the contrary, its bishops and priests had ended their public role of responding negatively to those who promoted a pro-choice agenda.

In some cases, church leaders actually started providing "cover" for Catholic pro-choice politicians who wanted to vote in favor of abortion rights. At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a "clear conscience."

The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book The Birth of Bioethics (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.

Mr. Jonsen writes that the Hyannisport colloquium was influenced by the position of another Jesuit, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a position that "distinguished between the moral aspects of an issue and the feasibility of enacting legislation about that issue." It was the consensus at the Hyannisport conclave that Catholic politicians "might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order."

Father Milhaven later recalled the Hyannisport meeting during a 1984 breakfast briefing of Catholics for a Free Choice: "The theologians worked for a day and a half among ourselves at a nearby hotel. In the evening we answered questions from the Kennedys and the Shrivers. Though the theologians disagreed on many a point, they all concurred on certain basics . . . and that was that a Catholic politician could in good conscience vote in favor of abortion."

It is an interesting footnote that, despite his open rebellion against his church's fundamental moral teachings, Charles Curran is not only still accepted as a member of his church in good standing, but also still an ordained priest in that church. (See his faculty page at SMU.)

Prof. Anne Hendershott teaches "Introduction to the City" at The King's College in New York City.

The King's College Puzzles New York City

The King's College is in the news again. But it's the same story that everyone writes. The Village Voice. The Washington Post. Now The New York Times. ("In a Worldly City's Tallest Tower, a College With a Heavenly Bent," December 19, 2008. The title as it originally appeared was "For Evangelical College, Home is Where the Sin Is." I wonder what went into that editorial change of mind.)

They just can't get over the fact that an Evangelical Christian college would wade into a city that provides so many opportunities for sin. (Never mind the cultural, intellectual, media, and business opportunities.)

But the opportunity for sin is not isolated in any one city or in cities in general. Sin is in every heart and makes its own opportunities. You can't run away from sin any more than you can run away from your shadow.

These reporters marvel that The King's College doesn't have a long list of rules and that yet they don't exercise the licentious freedom that other college students do. That is because being a Christian is not just a church affiliation or an ideology, as these reporters imagine it is. It is a work of grace in the human heart that drives out old loves and introduces new ones, viz., a love for Christ and for all that he loves. A Christian who is growing spiritually is a Christian who is growing in those new loves. The Westminster Shorter Catechism (Q. 35) tells us that sanctification is "the work of God's free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness." I see this in my students.

So the story reports Jonathan Seidl, a senior at the college, saying, “One of the reasons we’re not interested in getting drunk like ‘typical’ college students is because our faith teaches us that being responsible, and in some cases abstaining from those things, offers the most fulfilling life.” The reporter adds, "The same applied, several students said, to premarital sex."

But I'm glad we got the New York Times before the paper goes belly up. Perhaps The New York Sun, a much better newspaper, will return to take it's place.

The King's College on the Front Page

The King's College in New York City (where I teach) is the cover story in this month's American Spectator ("King's of New York" by Shawn Macomber). He writes, "While there is no air of elitism at King's, it is clear that these young men and women are elite."

The article is not available online, so you will have to buy a copy, read it at Barnes and Noble, or find it at the library, a real bother for all of us who've been corrupted by Google.

You can also see some of the school's best students in this FoxNews story.

Sept. 19 update: You may now download a pdf of the article.