But oh! thy Wisdom, Lord! thy Grace! thy Praise!
Open mine Eyes to see the same aright.
Take off their film, my Sins, and let the Rayes
Of thy bright Glory on my peepholes light.
I fain would love and better love thee should,
If ‘fore me thou thy Loveliness unfold.

Edward Taylor
Meditation 35

• Micah Watson on religion, reason and the common good at the Making Men Moral conference at Union University earlier this year.
• A problem for today’s atheist intellectuals: how do they keep God away from the kids?
• A new book by Bethany Moreton, with the attention grabbing title of To Serve God and Wal-Mart, is reviewed at PopMatters.
• An embryo is a human: Maureen Condic, Patrick Lee, and Robert P. George.
• An essay by editor of The City Ben Domenech on marriage, population, and social change inspired a few responses at First Things, The Atlantic, and Mere Orthodoxy. A followup piece that gets deeper into the statistics is here.
• Matthew Milliner, who has a piece on contemporary art in our forthcoming issue, has a post on Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts’ Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto exhibit. Read it here.
• Last, an excellent sermon on humility from Jeremy Begbie, the new Thomas A. Langford Research Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School.

The sweetest joys and delights I have experienced, have not been those that have arisen from a hope of my own good estate; but in a direct view of the glorious things of the gospel. When I enjoy this sweetness, it seems to carry me above the thoughts of my own safe estate. It seems at such times a loss that I cannot bear, to take off my eye from the glorious, pleasant object I behold without me, to turn my eye in upon myself, and my own good estate.

Jonathan Edwards
Personal Narrative

• Some reactions to the protests in Iran (and President Obama’s decision not to get involved) here, here and here.
• David Novak writes at Public Discourse on why we should oppose same-sex marriage. We will have pieces on the possibility of reconciliation on this issue from Jonathan Rauch and Joseph Knippenberg in the issue soon to appear on your doorstep.
• Jordan J. Ballor, who will be reviewing a book on religion and the media for us in that same summer issue, discusses Protestant approaches to law at First Things.
• And Peter Lawler, who will have a piece on Solzhenitsyn in this thrice mentioned issue (which, you can tell, is on our minds) has a piece on his dismissal from the President’s bioethics council over the weekend.
• Finally, Patrick Kavanaugh writes on the real obstacle to creativity: too many possibilities.

There were some who dared in the opinion of the multitude to immortalize themselves; and notwithstanding that the very sense of sight bore witness to their mortality, were ambitious to be called gods, and were honoured as such; to what a length of impiety would not many men have proceeded, if death had not gone on teaching all men the mortality and corruptibility of our nature? Hear, for instance, what the prophet says of a barbarian king, when seized with this frenzy. “I will exalt,” says he, “my throne above the stars of heaven; and I will be like unto the Most High.”

Afterwards, deriding him, and speaking of his death, he says, “Corruption is under you, and the worm is your covering;” but his meaning is, “Do you dare, O man, whom such an end is awaiting, to entertain such imaginations?” Again, of another, I mean the king of the Tyrians, when he conceived the like aims, and was ambitious to be considered as a God, he says, “You are not a God, but a man, and they that pierce you shall say so.” Thus God, in making this body of ours as it is, has from the beginning utterly taken away all occasion of idolatry.

Chrysostom
Homilies Concerning the Statues

• At the newly redesigned First Things online, Elizabeth Scalia responds to the death of George Tiller: “The Pauline paradox “when I am weak, then I am strong” carries a flipside: “When I am strong, then I am weak.” Relativism is dangerous because we can too easily slip into the belief that we so well comprehend God’s will that we can confuse our own will for God’s, and thereby do terrible damage to one another. God’s rain falls on “the just and the unjust,” and it is one of the challenges of the life of faith that we must leave to God the rendering of his Justice.”
• At GetReligion, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway asks “How Muslim Are We?” in response to President Obama’s statement that the United States also could be considered as “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” This is a bit of a stretch in the numbers department, but could he mean philosophically? An interesting question.
• A piece on “Competitive Altruism” — otherwise known as what your grandmother called “being a showoff” — reminds us of the benefit of anonymous giving: “Traditionally, economists have presumed that if people are seeking status, they will simply buy the most luxurious product they can afford. But Griskevicius and his colleagues — Joshua Taylor of the University of New Mexico and Bram Van den Bergh of the Rotterdam School of Management — theorized that when given an eco-friendly alternative, competitive altruism would compel people to forgo luxury for environmental status. To test the theory, they conducted several experiments.”
• The always entertaining P.J. O’Rourke reflects on the end of our love affair with the car (and GM) in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal.
• Julie Vermeer Elliot is concerned by the belated discernment exhibited by evangelical viewers of Jon and Kate Plus Eight. She writes: “It was not until the recent allegations of sexual impropriety arose that a significant number of Christians began to question whether Jon and Kate were indeed the examples of faithful living that we had imagined. Somehow most of us missed the long trajectory that was, day by day, moving them farther from a life of Christian virtue. Sexual immorality—whether actual or merely suspected—caught our attention, but the materialism, narcissism, and exploitation of children that preceded it was largely overlooked.” Read the rest here.

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.

Blaise Pascal
Pensées

• There have been a couple of responses to President Obama’s much-discussed invitation to speak at the Notre Dame’s commencement at First Things. Lacy Dodd, a Notre Dame alumnus and Army officer who became pregnant at Notre Dame and made the decision to keep her child writes that Notre Dame needs to take an “unambiguous stand for life,” and Mary Ann Glendon refuses Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal in an open letter to Fr. John I. Jenkins. HBU’s own Hunter Baker has provided an interesting follow-up post at Touchstone’s blog, Mere Comments. For a perspective on the larger issues at work here, it is worth reading John G. Turner’s review of Jon A. Shields’s The Democratic Virtues of the Right over at Books & Culture.
• Carson Holloway has an insightful essay over at Public Discourse regarding the rhetorical strategy of advocates of gay marriage. He writes: “One of the most troubling aspects of the same-sex marriage movement is the rhetorical strategy it so frequently employs: denunciation of its opponents. The most vocal and prominent advocates of same-sex marriage seem to prefer condemning those who disagree as bigots to refuting the arguments for preserving marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Moreover, this tendency is found not just among partisan activists, where one might expect it even while lamenting it, but even among the voices of the most venerable institutions.” Read the rest here.
• Our own Robert Sloan has begun to blog for Touchstone’s Mere Comments as well. Dr. Sloan’s first post is a response to Jon Meacham’s article in Newsweek on the decline of Christianity in the United States. Read it here.
• Though he perhaps misses the personal rather than theological nature of Joe Knippenberg’s review of Francis Beckwith’s Return to Rome in our Spring issue, Mathew Milliner nevertheless has some interesting thoughts on the Catholic question here and here.
• Last, Daniel A. Siedell, author of God in the Gallery, engages the question of what makes great art from a Christian perspective. Christian artists of the world, unite!