Is Science Inherently an Act of Piety?

Posted on March 2, 2018 by theamericanplutarch

During the past century science has become so focused on the material and the secular as to deny what was one of the essential characteristics of Western scientists going back three millennia: piety. Ancient Greek scientists perceived religion and science to be part of the same pursuit into the nature of being. Medieval scientists followed the Aristotelian path to discovering what they conceived to be the nature of God. Renaissance and Enlightenment scientists could hardly doubt that the Creation that they studied via mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and geology is Elder Scripture, the word of God older than, and just as authoritative as, the Old and New Testaments. The nineteenth-century geologist Edward Hitchcock’s belief that religion and geology are commensurate, the turn of the century psychologist William James’s belief that religion played a vital role in human psychology, and the early twentieth-century physicist Albert Einstein’s desire to know through science the mind of God, reveal that some nineteenth and twentieth century scientists relied on piety to approach the scientific study of human and natural phenomena.
Science is a pious enterprise and endeavor: the search to know the secrets of the universe and to reach the limits of human understanding occurs within the context of nature, an overwhelming entity that dwarfs us, generating a pious response, demanding reverence and humility, generating as well a sense of continuity and purposeful change, that answers exist to questions, that there is order rather than chaos, that reason and knowledge exist. Piety involves a sense of awe of the universe and a realization that being plays a role, whatever that might be, in its creation and constancy. Pious scientists have had an awareness of the profundity of existence, of life, and the role of something, an act moving upon potential, making and sustaining life.
Scientific and religious thought are complementary not contradictory. Scientists prior to the modern age were convinced that their research into nature shed light on the divine. The most valid response to God the Creator was a pious attempt to understand His Creation. Thinkers showed piety through natural theology; a belief in the continuity of and order in the universe; belief in natural laws; and a belief that human reason can (and will) discover natural laws.
Cultural and social influences during the past four centuries have led to a questioning of the divine role in the creation of the universe, resulting in a reconsideration of God the Creator, the divine role in the creation of the universe that is revealed through divine works, resulting in more of a general anonymous sense of a great mystery in the universe that could or could not be divine.
There was a definite change from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries in the perception of God the Creator. Thomas Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm in scientific thought helps to explain this change. The seventeenth century was a time of a providential God in control of all aspects of natural and human history. The eighteenth century moved toward a deistic God the Creator who put in motion a Creation that required very little divine intervention. Skepticism brought about by the critical discoveries of the nineteenth century resulted in the sense of the divine as a vague supernatural force that has some sort of a role in the vastness and complexity of the universe. Thinkers into the twentieth century were increasingly agnostic and atheistic in doubting any kind of supernatural agency at work in the universe.
Piety changes during this time from a clear sense of a personal God, a Christian God, to a more generic sense of a Creator God to a more amorphous mysterious presence; but during the whole there is an awareness and awe of the universe and (perhaps) its maker that is pious if not religious, piety being a sense of wonderment and humility when faced with a natural phenomenon that sometimes seems to defy explanation.
I wonder, is the driving motivation for those who pursue the physical, life, social, behavioral, and mathematical sciences, piety?……

For more on the history of science, see my Science in the Ancient World: From Antiquity to the Middles Ages, republished in a paperback by Bloomsbury Jan 22, 2026: find it at https://www.amazon.com/Science-Ancient-World-Antiquity-through/dp/B0FSW74DKZ/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_aufs_ap_sc_dsk_0?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=6oCC7&content-id=amzn1.sym.299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_p=299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_r=142-5197957-8175817&pd_rd_wg=Erb81&pd_rd_r=7cdd0d6a-0a38-49cf-a2ba-a1a0959be396

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The Liberal Arts: The Continuing Foundation for Learning in Our Society by means of the Trivium and Quadrivium

Posted on February 4, 2018 by theamericanplutarch

The Liberal Arts are based in the historical trivium and quadrivium. The Trivium is Latin, literally “a place where three roads meet”. Quadrivium is Latin for where four roads meet.

The Liberal Arts of today derive from the meeting of three to four historical roads: the ideas of human expression and knowledge of the Ancient Greeks and Romans; the Medieval striving to preserve the humanistic ideas of the ancient world; the rebirth of ancient learning that occurs during the Renaissance and Enlightenment; and the rebirth of mathematics and science during the Scientific Revolution of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

The liberal arts involve the study of those subjects that open the mind and help bring about a free people.  Liberal is Latin for “suitable for a free person.” Arts is “skill as a result of learning or practice.”

Hence Liberal Arts means the study of subjects to gain an expertise so to acquire the habits and personality of a person who lives a free life, that is, lives in such a way to be free from outside influences, to know precisely what one’s personal beliefs, derived from personal experience, are.

The Ancient Greeks provided the foundation for the Trivium and Quadrivium, as they were defined later in the Middle Ages, because of their focus on philosophy, literature, rhetoric, history, art and architecture, mathematics, the life and physical sciences. The Roman Empire encompassed the learning of the ancient Greeks, and brought such learning forward into the centuries after the birth of Christ. But the Roman Empire went through a political and cultural decline—the liberal arts of the ancient Greeks declined as well. In the resulting period subsequently called the Dark or Middle Ages (Medieval Europe), there were some isolated centers of learning that continued to preserve ancient Graeco-Roman (typically called Classical) learning. These centers of learning were usually connected to Roman Catholic monasteries. It was during this time that the terms Trivium, for logic, grammar, and rhetoric, and Quadrivium, for arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, were coined. European society, culture, and economy went through a resurgence beginning in the 12th century, which led to the European Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution.

 

The Trivium: the arts of thought and communication

  1. Logic: logic refers to philosophy, to human thought, the fact that humans are thinkers, able to conceptualize ideas, to try to achieve a sense of what exists, or “is,” that is being, which is not subject to time. Example: Humans like all animals feel. When a human feels a sense of warmth toward another being, a sense of attachment, of not wanting to be separated, they conceptualize this feeling as Love. Love is not material or physical; it is simply an idea based on conceptualized feelings.
  2. Grammar: grammar refers to symbols that humans have invented to symbolize the concepts and ideas that they have conceptualized. These symbols can be learned and shared, which form the basis of communication. So, for example, the concept of Love can be designated by four symbols, L, O, V, E, joined together.
  3. Rhetoric: rhetoric are all of the arts of communication that humans use to share their ideas and concepts by means of symbols. Humans can therefore share an idea or concept, such as Love, by means of symbols that are expressed through writing or speaking.

 

Quadrivium: the arts of temporal and spatial reasoning

  1. Arithmetic: because humans live in time and space, they keep track of movement in time and space by counting and measurement. The Counting function is arithmetic, and the Spatial function is geometry. Arithmetic is the way to make sense of the multitude of things (quantities) and movement in our environment over time.
  2. Geometry: Geometry is the way humans make sense of the multitude of things and movement in our environment that take up space. We observe various things at particular moments in time and can make sense of how they relate to us in terms of distance, volume, and dimension.
  3. Music: Music is using arithmetic, counting things and movement in time, as it applies to sounds and harmony. Special notes are created to keep track of these sounds moving through time. Music symbolizes human creativity in different cultures.
  4. Astronomy: Astronomy is measuring space and its vast dimensions over time. We observe various things over time and can make sense of how they relate to us in terms of distance, volume, and dimension. Astronomy symbolizes the hard sciences, examining movement (physics), material substances (chemistry, geology), and organic substances (biology).

The Liberal Arts continue to form the basis for thought, expression, and reasoning in our culture, from the past to the present and into the future.

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The Small Liberal Arts College in Crisis: Is there a Solution?

Posted on October 15, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

I teach at a small parochial liberal arts college in Oklahoma. Like other such colleges, parochial and secular, this college, Bacone College, is continually in crisis: financial crisis, enrollment crisis, staffing crisis, management crisis.

There are a host of reasons leading to said crises: the high costs of attending a small private college compared to a public university; the comparative dearth of resources of a small college; the heavy reliance upon enrollment and tuition to keep finances from going in the red; the sacrifice of academics to sports programs; the reliance upon fluctuating members of the board of trustees for leadership; the top-down style of management that small institutions tend toward.

The value of historical study is that it provides a sense of a long-term perspective of the past to the present, which often helps suggest guidance for the future.

Based on my research and writing for Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years, as well as my (going on) 18 years as a professor at Bacone College, I believe I have gained some perspective on Bacone’s past, present, and possible future, which provides, perhaps, lessons for other small liberal arts colleges. The 138 years of Bacone College suggests:

Bacone College was founded 138 years ago by missionaries from the American Baptist Home Mission Society to bring Christian education to the Indians of Indian Territory, Oklahoma Territory, and elsewhere. The American Baptists controlled the college until about 60 years ago when they decided to move on from its oversight and sizable financial commitment, to allow Bacone to be governed independently by a Board of Trustees answerable to no outside source of governing authority and commensurate financial assistance. There were predictable leadership, management, and financial consequences. From the beginning in 1880, Almon Bacone, and since then all of his successors, wanted Bacone to be independent of all tribal control, which independence guaranteed a flexibility in decision making but a lack of financial resources. Whatever endowment Bacone once had was spent many years ago. Hence the dependence on enrollment and tuition.

Athletics has, for many years now, especially since 1999, kept the college open, but the problem has been that athletics has come before academics, which is an unworkable situation for a college. It is almost like increasing debt: as the debt and interest rates rise the debtor can scarcely get out of debt without taking on more. As the college grows ever more dependent on athletics it can scarcely rid itself of this non-academic encumbrance and indeed must continue to recruit and take on more. If college resources go toward athletic programs and staff, then academics by comparison suffer.

The mission of the college has been unclear for years. There are many private Christian schools connected to a denomination, and many private American Indian schools connected to a tribe. But how many private colleges that are Christian without a clear denominational presence (in terms of students, faculty, administration, oversight, and financial support) or American Indian without a clear tribal presence (providing leadership and money) can survive in today’s world? Back in the 1950s, Bacone began to move away from its exclusive concern with American Indians. Why? The college was struggling to make a go of it then, as well as now. It makes sense to continue to broaden the college outward to all racial and ethnic groups. Besides, in the past thirty years there are a multitude of tribal colleges that take away the potential pool of applicants for Bacone.

For many years now, stretching back more than half a century, Bacone has had no realistic, workable strategic plan. Such a plan must be based on set, established academic programs that are consistent and comparable in order to attract a pool of students. Bacone has long been uncomfortably caught between professional and academic programs—almost like a split personality. Professional programs (business, health, education, criminal justice) lead to a clear career path and jobs after graduation. Academic programs (Liberal Arts) can lead to a career path and jobs but not as clearly; academic programs can prepare students for graduate school. Bacone has never had academic programs clearly intended to prepare students for graduate school, hence top notch students who want to pursue academics beyond the bachelors degree have little incentive to attend. A college that has a shotgun approach to majors will find it hard pressed to attract serious students—hence the reliance upon athletics. There are many professional schools all over eastern Oklahoma competing with Bacone’s business, health, criminal justice, and education programs, and they cost a lot less; but there are not as many small private liberal arts colleges preparing students for career as well as graduate work.

The key to college success resides in the faculty. Faculty have to feel invested, central to planning and decision making, because they are the ones who ultimately can attract students and bring students forward to degree completion to ensure continuous successful enrollment, year after year. Bacone has since 1880 had a top down administration in which faculty are very little, and rarely, directly involved. The faculty must be equal to the administration in terms of planning and decision-making because the faculty, in their day-to-day interaction with students—and not the administration—are ultimately in charge of academics. This is why successful schools have faculty tenure (or the like), because tenure guarantees to the faculty that they can be invested and central to the college without having to fear for their jobs. Bacone has never had tenure. And, successful schools have active and forthright faculty governance that is engaged equally to the administration; Bacone has never really had this either.

Bacone—and by comparison, I believe, many other small private liberal arts colleges—will never be able to emerge from the quagmire it has been in for many years, until . . .

  1. it can focus its attention on academics rather than athletics (athletics as a consequence of academics is, of course, acceptable), which means to make a decision to focus on degree plans that fill a necessary liberal arts niche and will bring students to study;
  2. it embrace a clear and consistent academic purpose in terms of successful liberal arts programs preparing students for graduate studies as well as careers;
  3. it can develop a clear, realistic mission—based on Bacone’s past, this would be an ecumenical Christian approach as well as a multicultural approach filling the needs of students with particular racial, ethnic, class, and personal needs;
  4. it can embrace faculty as equal partners in recruitment, planning, governance, and delivery of academic programs.

There is an important role for the small liberal arts college in America. Foresight and strategic planning based on an understanding of the past and the needs of the present must replace knee-jerk reactions to immediate crises and unconsidered responses to the exigencies of the moment—such is the key to survival and success.

For more on Bacone College, see Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years: Lawson, Dr. Russell Matthew: 9780977244805: Amazon.com: Books

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The Return to McCarthyism

Posted on September 26, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

Almost seventy years ago, an obscure senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, used fear as a means to initiate widespread panic and intimidate the innocent.

Fear can do this to people. Fear makes the rational become irrational, the innocent become guilty, the mainstream become evil. McCarthy used the fear of communism to instigate mass panic throughout America. Seemingly rational people began to accuse others of being communist without any evidence whatsoever. The panic gained momentum. Anyone who disagreed with McCarthy was accused of being a communist. Anyone who spoke out against the fear-inspired panic became guilty for even questioning the relevance of the panic. The McCarthyists, emboldened by a narrative of lies that became a pseudo-truth, went after anyone who displeased them: the reasonable, the level-headed, those who reserved judgment, those who realized that such fear-inspired panic is a constant throughout human history.

A narrative of falsehood gains momentum simply because the most outrageous accusations are difficult to defend by even-handedness. If a person is accused of being a racist, the label inevitably sticks, and is difficult to shed. Any statement to the contrary, any attempt to defend oneself, is considered further proof of inherent racism.

This is why the presidents during the McCarthy years, Truman and Eisenhower, refused to confront McCarthy, because in so doing they would automatically be accused of being communist, and be unable to shed the accusation.

Fear-induced panic convinces all but the most courageous to hide their head in a hole until the panic subsides.

President Trump should have learned this important political lesson: never, never, courageously defend yourself against outrageous accusations, because the accusers will continue to make the accusation, and the accusation will be considered truth itself.

As a history professor and writer, it is disheartening to see so many intelligent people return to the mechanisms of McCarthyism. I thought maybe we had learned our lesson. Obviously not.

 

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Is the Message Still Relevant?

Posted on September 11, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

For 2000 years, since Jesus commanded his disciples to go spread the good news to all nations, Christian messengers, or missionaries, have traveled throughout the world spreading the message of hope and redemption. There are few people on the Earth who have not heard this message. Messengers have translated the Bible into a hundreds of languages—and more translations keep coming. Especially in the past 500 years, Europeans, in the wake of aggressive imperialism, increased their efforts to spread the message to North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Often missionary work has been an apology for conquest, slaughter, and enslavement. In the late 1800s, European competition for world power led to horrifying imperialistic actions in Africa. For example, beginning in the 1880s, King Leopold II of Belgium brutally expanded Belgic power into the Congo in the name of civilization and Christianity.

Indeed, for centuries Christian apologists have claimed that unless a people adopt European customs, values, dress, and language, they cannot be properly converted to Christianity, hence receive salvation.

At the same time, the European heritage has become increasingly materialistic, hedonistic, and narcissistic, such that the expanding noise of modern technology and communications seems to be drowning out the message of Christ.

Is the message still worth listening to?

Yes, if the message is in its purist form.

The purity of the message is found in the Gospel, first and foremost, in the teachings and actions of the Son of Man. Here we read firsthand, albeit through translation, the words of Jesus of Nazareth rather than the many commentators and expostulators who often distort the message for their own purposes.

And so, for people throughout the world who have routinely been dispossessed of property, human rights, liberty, and life, we hear words that bring peace to our anguished souls. For its true that in reading the Gospel,
You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free.

Read about the life of a person who made the message relevant to people living in the 18th century: Apostle of the East: The Life and Journeys of Daniel Little.

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All Things are Possible

Posted on August 27, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

Recent conflict and protests in America, about statues and monuments recalling troubling events in the past, seem to be dividing a country that clearly needs uniting. Those who focus on division rather than unity seem to think that all things are possible—that the sky is the limit for the future, and all they have to do is imagine it, protest for the sake of it, made a lot of noise about it, and it will come about.

Protesters are focusing on the American past, but ironically their view of the past is shortsighted, if not altogether ignorant. The past is not just a few isolated events from the collective memory about which people who otherwise know little about history can gather and make noise.

The philosophy of presentism—living for the moment without a deep appreciation of the past or an anticipation of the future based on the past—is how problems of division, conflict, manipulation of others, acquisition of power, and the creation of totalitarian states, occur. If all a person can do is consider how the present moment, one after another, might make him/her feel good because of a brief moment of feeling significant, powerful, and important, then such a person is ripe for the exploitation of demagogues, who typically promise that such feelings, such power, such a narcissistic trip, will continue—as long as you believe in the opposition to what is steady, orderly, traditional—the establishment.

Protest for the sake of protest is wrongheaded. It upsets order, creates chaos, but fulfills a momentary urge to feel significant.

Look, I have many of the same suspicions of the power elite that protesters have. But I am not marching through the streets carrying placards screaming at the top of my lungs. Why?

Because, for one thing, I have a historical perspective. Emergencies—what appears to be something that has to be done, NOW—are rarely emergencies—they just seem that way in the moment. I truly believe the philosophy recorded in Ecclesiastes, that there is “a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; . . . a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to be silent and a time to speak”—overall, “time and chance happens to them all.”

Yes, time and chance happens to us all. We need to know patience, to accept what has happened, what will happen.

All things are possible. But remember the caveat to this phrase, as found in the Gospel of Matthew? “All things are possible”—with God. The disciples were upset because Jesus had told them that it is more difficult for a rich man to go to heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. How, then, can anyone be saved? “With God, all things are possible,” Jesus said. The point is, that humans try to do so much, but our individual and collective weakness prevents us from doing what we want: we cannot, in short, make all things that can possibly occur actually occur. And to try to is to court disappointment because our time rarely conforms to God’s time.

Contentment, in short, is based on waiting. A person can act, a person can dream, a person can try their hardest. But in the sum of all things, according to the vast stretch of time of which you and I are just a very small part, the future is unknown, and what is about to happen is unknown: all we can do is wait–for humans can do very little, but with God, all things are possible.

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Historical Sites along the Maine Coast: Kittery to York

Posted on July 13, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

Kittery, Maine, situated on the northern shores of the Piscataqua River, was a home to seamen and fishermen. Most such men of the salt sea were not well known in their own time and forgotten today. An exception was Lieutenant Andrew Newcomb, son of Captain Andrew Newcomb, the son following the father in the life of the sea. Captain Newcomb lived in Boston during the 1660s to 1680s, sailing his shallop laden with cargo up and down the Atlantic coast. Where his son Andrew was born is unknown. He appears in the historical record in the 1660s at Hog Island, one of the northernmost of the Isles of Shoals; Hog Island was under the jurisdiction of Maine in the 1600s, and has been ever since. The Isles of Shoals was an important center of the New England fishery during the colonial period. Fishermen such as Andrew Newcomb would set sail for daily or longer voyages to the Gorges Banks or other such fishing grounds where haddock, cod, mackerel, and other fish were captured. Back at Hog Island, the fisherman would cut and salt the fish and let it dry in the sun before being stored in a barrel for export. Andrew was married to Sarah, whose maiden name is unknown, but who bore seven children, Simeon, Andrew, Simon, Thomas, Sarah, Mary, and Peter. Sometime in the late 1660s Andrew and Sarah bought land at Kittery, in the north parish, what is today Eliot Maine. Here the family resided while Andrew carried on his trade and stayed involved in Hog Island affairs. For example in 1671 he was a constable on Hog Island serving a warrant on a drunken sailor who resisted. Mary died within a few years of their move to Kittery; Andrew, in debt and looking for new opportunities, moved his family to Martha’s Vineyard, where he married again and had eight more children with Anna Bayes, and became a prominent citizen.

Kittery is also famous as being the home of Sir William Pepperrell, the hero of the assault on Louisburg in 1745. William Pepperrell, Sr., arrived in America from Wales by way of Newfoundland in the mid 1600s; he settled at the Isles of Shoals and took up fishing. His business was sufficiently profitable to allow him to relocate on shore at Kittery Point, a peninsula jutting into the Piscataqua east of Kittery town. William married Margery Bray, daughter of Kittery shipbuilder and merchant John Bray, establishing by his alliance with the Bray family a foundation for future mercantile success. William Pepperrell, Jr., was born to William Sr. and Margery on June 27, 1696. Already his father was a major landowner and merchant involved in naval stores, shipbuilding, and the trans-Atlantic trade. By the time William Jr. was 21 years old, he was made a partner in the firm, “The William Pepperrells,” and assumed supervision over Pepperrellboro, the town and immediate environs of the lower Saco River and the village of Saco, most of which the Pepperrells owned. William Jr. rose rapidly in political circles as well, becoming Colonel and commander of the Maine militia, and a Provincial Councilor to the General Court of Massachusetts, representing Maine. Indeed Maine had been under the political control of Massachusetts since the 1650s and would be designated the District of Maine until it became an independent state in 1820. Pepperrell was a leader, then, in the political affairs of Maine and Massachusetts. He was a close associate of Massachusetts governors, being made Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas by Governor Jonathan Belcher, and working with Governor William Shirley to plan the audacious assault on the French fortress of Louisburg on the island of Cape Breton.

During the second to the last of the Great Wars for Empire fought between the French and the English, the Cape Breton War (King William’s War, 1744-1749), William Pepperrell, Jr. led New Hampshire and Maine soldiers to accomplish what most observers of the time considered improbable if not impossible. The French fort of Louisburg guarded the approaches to the St. Lawrence River. The English controlled Newfoundland and, by the Treaty of Utrecht ending Queen Anne’s War (1703-1713), Nova Scotia. However Cape Breton Island lay in-between, and the fortress at Louisburg promised to harass English shipping and colonial possessions during conflicts between the two great empires. Massachusetts Governor William Shirley realized the strategic importance of Louisburg, and decided, with William Pepperrell, to eliminate the French threat. Pepperrell amassed a force of over four thousand men; they journeyed north to Port Royal, Nova Scotia, then crossed Gabarus Bay to the southern shores of Cape Breton. They quickly marched the short distance to the fortress, to the surprise of the French commander Duchambon. Through subterfuge, will, and courage, the English succeeded in capturing the fort. Pepperrell became immensely famous as a consequence, and was granted the title of Baronet by King George II.

Today’s Maine Route 103 takes the exploring motorist from Kittery to Kittery Point, where the Lady Pepperrell house stands as well as the Pepperrell family burial ground. Nearby is Fort McClary, maintained by the State of Maine. On this site, at the southern extreme of Kittery Point looking out over the mouth of the Piscataqua River flowing into the Atlantic, William Pepperrell, Sr., had established basic fortifications to protect his property. In 1721, the Acts and Resolves of Massachusetts Bay Colony records a vote of the General Court “to erect breastworks in the town of Kittery for defense of the river”; these defenses were built on the site of Pepperrell’s initial fortifications. For years the fortifications were known as Fort Pepperrell or Fort William. At the beginning of the American Revolution, the New Hampshire revolutionary government confiscated the land and fortifications from the loyalist Pepperrell family. Soon after the fortifications were abandoned, and remained so until 1808, when the United States purchased the land from the State of Massachusetts and erected new fortifications named after a hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill. A granite wall and earthwork hosted several cannon to be manned by soldiers who lived in nearby barracks. The remains of these 1808 fortifications still exist; the foundation for the barracks also remains. A magazine to hold powder and balls was built in 1808 as well; this structure can still be toured by the visitor to the Fort.

Fort McClary is an astonishingly beautiful place to visit. The brisk salt air flows in from the Atlantic. In the far distance one spies Whaleback Lighthouse. Nearer, across the mouth of the Piscataqua one sees Fort Constitution, which guarded the entrance to Portsmouth harbor from the New Hampshire side. In the background is the town of Newcastle. The old stone walls of Fort Constitution stand next to the lighthouse of the U. S. Coast Guard. Fort McClary likewise is surrounded by ancient granite walls, fortifications built during the early nineteenth century. Below the walls the surf pounds at the natural granite of the shore. Spring wildflowers bloom even in this hazardous environment. Extending from the wall in several locations around the fort’s perimeter are caponiers, which provided defensive postures for artillery to fire at the enemy. In lieu of cannon, marksmen aimed from the caponiers or from the massive blockhouse at the center of the fortifications. The hexagonal blockhouse is several stories high. Its foundation is built into native granite; the first floor walls, likewise, are of granite. The second floor is built of timber. The blockhouse has numerous portals for lookouts and defenders.

The exploring motorist leaving Fort McClary departs north on the road (Route 103) to York. The old town of York, centered about the Old Gaol, the Jefford’s Tavern, the Old School House, and the Old Burying Ground. The Old Gaol held prisoners awaiting trial or corporeal punishment.

The Old Gaol [jail] at York was built in 1656, and was the sole gaol of the District of Maine during most of the colonial period. The present structure dates back to 1719. It had quarters for the gaoler and his family as well as two cells in which supposed ne’er-do-wells were kept pending trial and punishment. Stocks still exist at the site, revealing the proclivity of corporeal punishment in colonial New England regardless of gender or age. The Old Gaol is part of a complex of old structures maintained by the Old York Historical Society, including Jefford’s Tavern, dating from 1750, and the Old Schoolhouse, dating from 1745. The latter structure is located off Route 1 in York Village, and is adjacent to a delightful colonial graveyard featuring the best in period macabre headstones. The headstones of the Old Burying Ground tell in brief through pictures and epitaphs the lives of York men, women, and children.

The site of York is in the shadow of nearby Mount Agamenticus, which for a small mountain (691 feet) has a full history. Indian legends make Agamenticus the site of the famous chief of the Penacook tribe Passaconaway’s final resting place. The first explorers along the coast used the small peak as a seamark for bearings. Today’s journeyer can either drive or hike of Agamenticus; there a fire tower allows for quite an astonishing view for so small a peak. Jeremy Belknap, who ascended the mountain in 1780, observed “a most enchanting prospect. The cultivated parts of the country, especially on the south and south-west, appears as a beautiful garden, intersected by the majestick river Piscataqua, its bays and branches. The immense ranges of mountains on the north and north-west afford a sublime spectacle; and on the sea-side the various indentings of the coast from Cape Ann to Cape Elizabeth are plainly in view in a clear day; and the wide Atlantick stretches to the east as far as the power of vision extends.”

To read about an 18th century minister along the Maine coast, see

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The Philosophy of Veganism

Posted on July 10, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

I have been vegan.

Such a statement might immediately arouse suspicions: “Why would a person not eat fast food, hamburgers, chicken nuggets, steak, fish? Isn’t such food what a large part of the American economy is based on? How can a person who doesn’t eat meat get enough protein? Won’t your health suffer?”

Veganism, in addition, means more than vegetarianism: veganism means to refrain from eating any animal product: milk, ice cream, yogurt, cream, eggs: in today’s society, it is very difficult to avoid foods without some sort of trace of milk or eggs. The dairy industry is such an important facet of our society: why rebel against it?

So why go to all the trouble? Am I a tree-hugger? An extreme environmentalist? One of those fire-breathing Hollywood liberals? I am probably a left-wing activist as well, right? I probably march in protests against speciesism.

Rather, I am vegan not for ideological, political, environmental, social, economic, philosophical, liberal, or left wing, reasons.

I am vegan for religious reasons.

And no, I am not a Buddhist, or Hindu, or Jain, or Taoist. I am a Christian, meaning that I follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who said:

“Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.”

This is what the Gospel of Mark reports Jesus as having commanded his followers to do. The Greek word, “ktisis,” literally means “creature” or “creation.” How does one preach to all creatures, to the whole creation?

In my studies of Christian missionary movements, missionaries follow Matthew’s view of the Great Commission: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations.” This version of the Great Commission implies that missionaries will spread the Good News to other humans.

But there is a way to bring the Good News of life, love, and peace to the whole creation: By example: The example of preserving the sanctity of life. If I respect life in all its forms, and refuse to abuse it, and use it only as a means of survival, which all forms of life do; if I refuse to waste anything organic, and I am doing this because of the love of Christ, the love of the Word, through whom all things came to be–then I am by example preaching to the whole creation, or spreading a message of love to the whole creation.

Veganism is my way of being a missionary of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Doubtless some Christian theologians would find some of my views questionable, but then, I don’t believe theologians typically consider the sanctity of life as a whole—their focus is on human life. I, a human, live in time, so I am constrained by the limitations of time–so yes, if tested I would act in defense of my own family and community as many others have; that begs the question of whether taking life, any life, is right. I don’t think we humans really understand what the essence of life really is; we are still in the state of preservation of species, like any animal. But if we were someday to advance to a higher level of the understanding of the essence of life, what would our world be like then?

The closest statement I have found among Christian scholars to these sentiments comes from Pope Francis’s Encyclical Letter on Humans and God’s Creation, Laudatum Si, On Care for Our Common Home. I find what he says compelling: “The universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely. Hence, there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face. The ideal is not only to pass from the exterior to the interior to discover the action of God in the soul, but also to discover God in all things.”

To embrace veganism is to return to a simple pattern of life via a simple sense of time. Veganism is about accepting an overwhelming secret to the universe that humans need to find a way to empathize with, and to find peace in.

Veganism is about the following sentiment: if humans are advanced over other creatures, they need to act like it; civilization should actually mean something besides the exercise of human power. Civilization should have something to do with taking the lead among all creatures to preserve and protect life. As Pope Francis writes: “It is enough to recognize that our body itself establishes us in a direct relationship with the environment and with other living beings. The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation.”

Humans can hardly refrain from exercising power against other humans, much less against other forms of life on Earth. Humans exercise power over the weakest of humans, especially children and the unborn, and against the weakest of God’s Creation: insects, rodents, birds, fish, mammals. Jesus told his disciples that God watches over the most unprotected, the most apparently negligible of all creatures, such as sparrows. These little insignificant creatures are everywhere—so ubiquitous as to go almost unnoticed. Yet God, as Matthew records Jesus saying, attends even to sparrows, and feeds them: “Are you not much better than they?” he asks.

In God’s eyes, who is the better: humans or sparrows? I am not prepared to say. To the Father, the least might be best, the winner might be the loser. Until I know for sure, I will reserve judgment, and live as a vegan, doing my best to follow the Great Commission, and protecting the sanctity of all life.

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Independence: Disorder in a Democracy

Posted on July 4, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

In today’s day, we are confronted with disorder, almost chaos and anarchy at times. How do we bring order out of a disorderly situation? The concluding years of the American Revolution in the 1780s provides us with an example.

The Constitution was framed in the wake of the disorder caused by the American Revolution. In the 1780s there existed financial insecurity, economic decline, social unrest, political conflict. Ebenezer Hazard in Philadelphia and Jeremy Belknap of Boston were two thinkers who were part of the intellectual climate during which the Constitution was written. My book, Ebenezer Hazard, Jeremy Belknap, and the American Revolution (Routledge) provides a detailed overview of their respective political philosophies.

The challenge of the American Revolution was, for Hazard and Belknap, to somehow bring order out of an inherently disorderly situation. Eight years of conflict, chaos, and wanton freedom must be countered by stability and order. How? England represented order, against which the Americans waged a war for liberty. To gain liberty, disorder had to be pursued—in other words, war. Conservatives at the time reasoned that the disorder of too much liberty has to be constrained by government. The Americans could not have a revolution that was anarchic. They had to have some kind of order, which they accomplished with state governments and the Articles of Confederation. But this situation was one of thirteen sovereign powers attempting to unite the American people in a common government, and disorder and chaos still threatened. Conservatives, fearing disorder, decided to erect a more orderly government, the Constitution. The Constitution involved a reconciliation between freedom and order.

Jeremy Belknap and Ebenezer Hazard believed that the epoch of revolution, of liberty and the threat of disorder, was akin to the individual’s struggle with sin. God grants the individual free will, just as the Americans wanted to exercise their free will by declaring independence and achieving liberty from England. The problem with free will is that humans are prone to sin: free will leads to sin, from which, to recover, one must find grace in God’s forgiveness. For God establishes His eternal order of right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and sin, which humans try to conform to, and when they sin, which they inevitably do, they must reach out to God’s mercy for forgiveness. Just as human sin can be constrained, mitigated, by conforming to God’s order, God’s justice, so too human liberty that is too wanton can be constrained, mitigated, by government order, government justice. But can government ever approach the goodness of God, the order of God, the justice of God? The individual must recognize the sovereignty of God—that God’s will alone is the ultimate authority. Likewise, in civil affairs, can the people recognize a sovereign power that alone has the ultimate authority, that we can submit to, when necessary, even give up some of our liberty to, just as we submit to God, and know that we must sometimes give up some of our sinfulness, our free will, to conform to God’s order?

The U. S. Constitution was to Belknap and Hazard an example of sovereignty in civil affairs that would be akin to God’s sovereignty providing an overarching authority over individual free will.

https://www.routledge.com/Ebenezer-Hazard-Jeremy-Belknap-and-the-American-Revolution/Lawson/p/book/9780367643591

 

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Animals and Time

Posted on June 28, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

Do animals have an experience of time similar to humans? I believe so.

I propose that each life, whether human or animal, experiences time and the passage of time, hence history, individually, uniquely.

It is difficult for a human to know his/her own self much less another. The way we try to know another is through empathy based on our own experiences and feelings in time. Science attempts to provide an objective approach to knowing self, other humans, and humans in general.

But how can we know what other animals experience and feel? Is there a way to empathize with animals based on experience? We can try, but a difficulty will be the animal experience of time, the passage of time, which will be different from humans. Humans try to objectify time so that they can make sense of their own passing, but to try to do this with other creatures? How do other creatures experience time, hence their own sense of history? Are nonhuman creatures able to know how time is experienced by others of their own species?

Since different creatures experience time differently and have different lifespans this will shape how they consider themselves and others. Humans know approximately how long they might live and base decisions on this knowledge. Do other animals?
I have often thought that humans have a superiority to other animals because they have knowledge of time, they can anticipate the future, even to death. If an animal does not have a set perspective on time they will have a different experience of life, living for the moment rather than the past or future.

But perhaps I am wrong.

My pup Buzzy wakes me up every day when the sun rises. He anticipates the morning, and breakfast, and somehow or another, without using a clock or alarm, wakes up precisely on time. My four pups are constantly anticipating just about everything I do. Is this just the ability to discern my habits, or do they have a sense of time? And, if they have such a sense of time, perhaps they keep track of past and future–in other words, perhaps they have their own sense of history.

Much of the human concern with time is the worry over the future, aging, and death. We all know that death awaits, and we often think about the time we have left. How do we know that other animals, even the lowest creatures, don’t have this awareness? Perhaps they are anticipating their demise, fearing death, as much as we are. If so, then what does this mean for the food industry, for the wanton disregard for life displayed by humans in so many ways, such that we have a sense that if other animal life is unimportant to us, then we take away that life.

Many theologians stress how the human experience of time involves the process of discovery of self, of sin, and the yearning for redemption, conversion, and salvation. These religious experiences occur in time. If other animals experience time, do they also have similar spiritual experiences? Are we really so sure what the answer is?

Different animals have different lifespans. My pups will not live as long as I will. So I am on my fourth generation of pups in my life. I might even have a fifth generation. Marcus Aurelius in Meditations argues that duration is less important than experience of life. This is difficult to swallow, when we humans know that we have an average lifespan in the 70s. But think of all of the creatures that exist, many of which might have lifespans of just a few months. Is their experience of life, since shorter than the human lifespan, less significant, less important? Perhaps animals, living in conformity to the natural way, have a more enjoyable, even more profound experience of life than we humans, preoccupied with building, changing, creating, doing–money, power, luxury, and excess.

The more I study and think about animals, the less I am certain of the human assumption that we are in control of all other forms of life. I wonder: perhaps, to God, all forms of life are equal: all lives matter.

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