1. “I, Pencil” by Leonard E. Read
2. “Where Do Prices Come From?” by Russ Roberts
3. “What is Seen and What is Not Seen” by Frederic Bastiat
4. “They Clapped: Can Price Gouging Laws Prohibit Scarcity?” by Michael Munger
5. “The Road to Serfdom: Condensed Version as it Appeared in Reader’s Digest” by F. A. Hayek

New band from Justin Vernon of BON IVER

HT: Matt Jackson

This is does not mean that what we have seen is wrong, but simply that we see what we are conditioned to see.

Every method of study also has a predisposition to select for the type of information most agreeable to its particular way of viewing evidence. There is a definite self-selection process involved. Methods of study tend to “see” the data that they are best able to accommodate.

It is a bit like something that happens to me every time I buy a car. Having read up on my chosen vehicle, suddenly, I begin to see that particular make and model, and even a chosen shad of paint, wherever I go. I may never have given any attention to this make or model before, but suddenly I see it everywhere. It always feels quite miraculous. I buy a vehicle, and almost immediately everybody else in the world has one just like mine. I guess I’m quite the trend setter!

In other words, we all notice those things that we have been sensitized to see, the things that we already know how to categorize. Biblical and theological researchers are no different than the average car buyer.

David Crump, Encountering Jesus, Encountering Scripture: Reading the Bible Critically in Faith (Grands Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 123.

Largely in answer to these questions comes the timely book “What Is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense” (by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson and Robert P. George).

In the book the authors seek to answer the question by a logical, historical, and social argument. It is probably the most sophisticated natural law defense of marriage to date.

Their thesis is that marriage is a comprehensive union of persons.

Marriage essentially involves all-encompassing—including bodily—union, and sex unites bodily as no other activity can. But as we also show, sex that unites in this sense—making two people one, much as parts of a single body are one—requires a man and a woman.

First, it unites two people in their most basic dimensions, in their minds and bodies; second, it unites them with respect to procreation, family life, and its broad domestic sharing; and third, it unites them permanently and exclusively.

But before this definition, and probably my favorite part of the book, the authors show that the “revisionist” view of marriage must be wrong. In attempting to re-define marriage the “revisionist” view actually cuts off the very life cord for the state having any say in marriage at all. If it is simply an emotional bond then it is hard to show why the state should care at all.

The revisionist view severs this important link. If marriage is centrally an emotional union, rather than one inherently ordered to family life, it becomes much harder to show why the state should concern itself with marriage any more than with friendship. Why involve the state in what amounts to the legal regulation of tenderness? The revisionist proposes a policy that she cannot give reasons for enacting.

As we deprive marriage policy of definite shape, we deprive it of public purpose.

Rigorously pursued, the logic of rejecting the conjugal conception of marriage thus leads, by way of formlessness, toward pointlessness: it proposes a policy for which it can hardly explain the benefit.

There are no civil ceremonies for forming friendships or legal obstacles to ending them. Why is marriage different? The answer is that friendship does not affect the common good in structured ways that warrant legal recognition and regulation; marriage does.

As the authors repeatedly argue, the “revisionist” view of marriage does not simply ask for people to be loving and compassionate towards others who want to get married, but forces everyone to accept a new definition of marriage.

the current debate is precisely over whether the kind of union with marriage’s essential features can exist between two men or two women. Revisionists would not leave our basic understanding of marriage intact and simply expand the pool of people eligible to marry (as many states did to allow slaves to marry). They would abolish the conjugal view of marriage from our law and replace it with the revisionist view. They would make civil marriage no longer a comprehensive union but an emotional one,

All legal recognition divides the world in two: what is recognized, and everything else. Laws that distinguish marriage from other bonds will always leave some arrangements out. You cannot move an inch toward showing that marriage policy violates equality, without first showing what marriage is and why it should be recognized legally at all.

They close the book by saying that upholding the “conjugal” view of marriage actually bans nothing.

But traditional marriage law does not deny these companionate ideals to anyone. It does not discourage them or even prevent people from encouraging them. It makes many of these ideals easier to find outside marriage. And even if companionate bonds would be impaired without some public status, it does not follow that they would be impaired without legal status. Remarkably, then, one of the most common and powerfully felt objections to conjugal marriage policy is also one of the easiest to answer. The law simply has much less to do with this than people commonly suppose.

The same-sex civil marriage debate is not about anyone’s private behavior, but about legal recognition. The decision to honor conjugal marriage bans nothing.

For a good review see Matthew Lee Anderson’s.

Pornography use is just a private matter

Perhaps the queen bee of lies about the subject, this is also the easiest to take down. For while consumption of the substance may be private (or not, as airline travelers and library patrons and others in the public square have lately been learning), the fallout from some of that consumption is anything but.

Consider just a few examples from recent studies on people younger than eighteen. Several separate studies have found among adolescents a strong correlation between pornography consumption and engaging in various sexual activities. Adolescent users of pornography are more likely to intend to have sex, to have sex earlier, and to engage in more frequent sexual activity.8 The exceedingly well-documented social costs of adolescent sexual activity, alongside the health costs now accumulating, alone torpedo the refrain that Internet pornography use today is “private”.

Pornography use is a guy thing. It only bothers women

In fact, some of the saddest and most riveting testimony on this topic concerns exactly this: the harm that pornography consumption can do to men immersed in it.

Consider the research of Pamela Paul, a former reporter for Time magazine, who interviewed in depth more than one hundred heterosexual users of pornography—80 percent of them men—for her 2005 book Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families.10 This book—the best yet written in laymen’s terms about the impact of Internet pornography on users themselves—is remarkable for several reasons. Just one is the unforgettably sad portrait that emerges, sometimes unwittingly, from habitual users themselves. “Countless men”, she summarizes from the interviews, “have described to me how, while using pornography, they have lost the ability to relate to or be close to women. They have trouble being turned on by ‘real’ women, and their sex lives with their girlfriends or wives collapse.”

It’s only pictures of consenting adults

Unless it is computer simulated, pornography is never only about pictures. Every single person on the screen is somebody’s sister, cousin, son, niece, or mother; every one of them stands in a human relation to the world.

The notion for starters that those in the “industry” itself are not being harmed by what they do cannot survive even the briefest reading of testimonials to the contrary by those who have turned their backs on it. It is a world rife with everything one would want any genuinely loved one to avoid like the plague: drugs, exploitation, physical harm, AIDS. Nor can the “pictures” defense survive the extremely troubling—or what ought to be extremely troubling—connections between pornography and prostitution. What is now called “sex trafficking”, for example, is often associated with pornography—for example, via cameras and film equipment found when trafficking circles are broken up. Plainly, the reality of the human beings behind many of those images on the Internet is poorer, dirtier, druggier—and younger—than pious appeals to “consenting adults” can withstand.

As she says “No single event since Eve took the apple has been as consequential for relations between the sexes as the arrival of modern contraception.”

Her thesis is as follows:

First, the sexual revolution has proved a disaster for many men and women; and second, its weight has fallen heaviest on the smallest and weakest shoulders in society—beginning with the fetus and proceeding up through children and adolescents—is perhaps the most vivid example of the denial surrounding the fallout of the sexual revolution. In no other realm of human life do ordinary Americans seem so indifferent to the particular suffering of the smallest and weakest.

As she says, normally the sexual revolution is portrayed for the social and economic good it has produced.

The sexual revolution has been a nearly unmitigated boon for all humanity. Along with its permanent backup plan, abortion, it has liberated women from the slavery of their fertility, thus freeing them for personal and professional opportunities they could not have enjoyed before. It has liberated men, too, from their former chains, many would argue—chiefly from the bondage of having to take responsibility for the women they had sex with and/or for the children that resulted. It has also enriched children, some would posit, by making it easier to limit family size, and hence share the pie of family wealth and attention among fewer claimants.

She traces how it has affected men, women, children and young adults.

For men “the sexual revolution seems more like a slow-acting virus whose damage does not become apparent till much later in life. As Maggie Gallagher and Linda Waite, among other researchers, have emphasized, divorced men have higher rates of depression, alcoholism, and other forms of “risk taking.”

For women “the fallout from the revolution appears more immediate and acute. It is women who have abortions and get depressed about them, women who are usually left to raise children alone when a man leaves for someone else, women who typically take the biggest financial hit in divorce, and women who fill the pages of such magazines as Cosmopolitan and Mirabella and chatty websites like Salon with sexual doublespeak.”

She cites Albert Mohler who says in First Things:

I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the Pill. . . . The entire horizon of the sex act changes. I think there can be no question that the Pill gave incredible license to everything from adultery and affairs to premarital sex and within marriage to a separation of the sex act and procreation.

My only critique of the book is that she sometimes gravitates towards blaming all the ills of society on the pill.

Pornography, broken homes, children failing out of school, poverty are all a result of rampant sex that the pill allowed. And although I agree with her that the sexual revolution is a large part of the answer, there are other factors at play (which she I am sure would agree with). Pornography would have never boomed without the concurrent rise of the internet. Poverty cannot merely be traced back broken homes.

In other words her thesis seems to be a little too neat when there are other avenues from which to trace these outcomes.

That being said, the wealth of information and Eberstadt’s winsome analysis makes the book worthwhile. Additionally, she masterfully takes the argument of “the opponent” and wraps it around their neck. The very thing that promised freedom to the weakest has further enslaved them.

Rather than being a source of freedom, the sexual revolution has been a disaster to the smallest and the weakest.

She also rightly cautions Christians from bashing those on the other side of this issue:

Christian-bashing bloggers and pundits is not the answer. Do not treat your opponents as they will habitually treat you—as if the merest contact with them requires a giant pair of barbecue tongs. An example of what not to do is the way the mainstream media tend to report on evangelicals, especially, i.e., with all the anthropological frisson of explorers encountering the Stone Age Yonomami of the Brazilian rain forest for the first time. At a minimum, those on the other side ought not follow suit.

The table of contents can be found below.

Vampire Weekend: Vampires of the Modern City

John J. Thompson writes at ThinkChristian:

this is a multi-talented, highly literate and fascinating band that recently released one of the year’s most interesting records: Modern Vampires of the City. Don’t let the Pitchfork love turn you off. These lads are worth serious consideration. Super-fans who love spelunking into dense indie pop and chasing every lyrical reference will have enough to keep them busy until classes resume in August, while the rest of us can let these songs bang off of our heads and our hearts, enjoying the ambience even if we lack the requisite time to fully understand what the heck every line means.

If Bono is right and the best music is made by people either running toward or away from God, then Vampire Weekend has all bases covered. They seem to be doing both. Rarely have I found a record so full of criticism and rejection of my faith to be so compelling.

Daft Punk: Random Access Memories

Mark Richardson of Pitchfork says:

Daft Punk, in other words, have an argument to make: that something special in music has been lost. You can’t have an argument without a thesis, and they start the album with one called “Give Life Back to Music”. The song’s opening rush brings to mind “old” Daft Punk, but then come percussive guitar strums courtesy of Nile Rodgers followed by orchestral surges. From the jump, it’s clear that the particulars of the sound are important. In a strictly technical sense, as far as capturing instruments on tape and mixing them so they are individually identifiable but still serve the arrangements, RAM is one of the best engineered records in many years.

The National: Trouble Will Find Me

Megan Ritt of Consequence of Sound reflects:

Confidence. Comfort in one’s own skin. It’s the difference between trying too hard and coming off as a fraud or following your own heart and rising to the top. Many a band waffles after success, making, instead, what they think the audience wants to hear. But with Trouble Will Find Me, The National’s sixth full-length studio album outlines the confidence to expand and experiment with the formula, paired with the skills to do it justice.

The end result is a new kind of National album — still dark and neurotic, obsessed with modern-day paranoia, but also bursting with an unlikely optimism and a very 2013 zest for life. It’s approachable without compromise and confident enough to be itself, not another Alligator or High Violet, but unmistakably from the outset Trouble Will Find Me. Come what may, The National sound ready to face it.

- Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 273, quoting Maximus, Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, PG 90:877a, b.

In other quarters, the encounter with Jesus is buffered and deferred in the name of intellectual “rigor”, theological enlightenment, and overcoming “naive” faith. Too often, Crump points out, an “academic” approach to the Bible — whether “liberal” or “conservative” — ends up making the Bible something other than the means by which we are existentially encountered by Jesus. To approach the Bible in this way creates a blast wall that serves to protect us from the explosion of that encounter.

Crump is clear about his project.

My goal in this book is to secure thorough integration of heart, mind, and soul by keeping first things first. In the realm of Christian understanding, the most fundamental questions do not concern historical evidence, archaeological data, literary genre, or any of the sundry matters usually tied to the rational explanation of empirical evidence. Rather, the basic issues in this arena are epistemological and spiritual. How can a person come to know God?

HT: James K.A. Smith