Oak Island: Fascination with a buried treasure

When I was about 12 years old, as my fascination with books started growing, I bought a book from Scholastic Book Services about buried treasure.

The book was called "Treasures beneath the Sea".

It had chapters on various treasure mysteries all over the world.

One of those chapters was the mystery of Oak Island.

For those of you who don't know, Oak Island is a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia.

The fascinating history can also be detailed in a great Readers Digest article that also appeared in 1965.

History Canada has made a fascinating TV program out of the whole thing, including showcasing new owners of the Island, who are carefully trying to find out what exactly is buried on the island, and by whom.

The Curse of Oak Island.

History Canada is even having a contest this season, with the grand prize a trip for 2 to Halifax and a private tour of Oak Island.

Both my brother John and I have been entering each week....it would be an amazing trip.

And it's just fun to watch and wonder.

A lesson from History: Night Crossing

Having grown up during the cold war, I was fully aware of the risks that many, many people took in escaping their communist taskmasters.

This movie, Night Crossing, from the late 1970's....documents the story of two families who escaped from communist East Germany into West Germany, in a hot air balloon.

I've always loved the movie, for the glimpse it gives into life under communism, but also because it documents the bravery of the two families....wanting freedom for their kids...and willing to take risks to obtain it!

We have had all our kids watch it...so they get a small glimpse into the life their Mom had, living under communism.

We watched it again last night, with another family.

It was a great reminder of where we have come from.

Ironically, when we first had seen the movie, little did we know that in a few years the whole system would collapse.

Looking into the story again, I read that the two families were harassed by "unknown" folks even in the west, because East German officials were so bugged that the families had outsmarted them!

Great movie and a great family time.

Me & Sports

As the youngest of 4 boys, needless to say, our family was a "sports" family.

My older brothers were good at baseball, very, very good. My sister was also very, very good.

Hockey Night in Canada?  Bring it on in our home!

Alas, I was not gifted in the sports department.

Sure I loved hiking, skiing...those types of activities.

But watching sports was the worse torture for me.

I loved my siblings, but I had to be dragged out to watch their games.

Talent and ability in sports was NOT genetically handed down to me.

So I read.

It didn't make me better than everyone else....my parents let me choose my own path and interests.

It's just funny....my Dad and the rest of the family loved their televised hockey games...while I could not handle how boring they were.

For the record....I love going to live hockey games....the atmosphere in the stands is amazing!!  I just can't handle watching it on TV....it's like watching paint dry.

And...watching my own kids play sports?  I love this!!  It's the most amazing thing to watch!

Wired to remember....

I am wired to remember the past.

No, seriously.

It's both great and annoying.

It's why I never forget birthdays, or other important dates.  I actually relive some events in my mind...usually a year later.

It can take that long for me to process some of the events....so I relive them.

A year ago?

The last week of Mom's life.

So...I am reliving that week.  On this day I was doing this....doing that.  On this day we took Mom home from the hospital...the next day I brought her some soup Marina had made....said good-bye...told here again I loved her....and the next day she was gone.

January 9th.

A year already?

November 27th.  22 years since Dad was gone?

I guess...it shows us once again....you never know.

So..be kind....be loving....hug...tell those whom you love that you do care for them.

That last good-bye?

It could actually be a last good-bye.

I hope I learned that.

A Medieval Perspective on Modern Identity Politics

 

Great article from First Things. I would just add that "Identity Politics" actually diminish our humanity for short term gain.

We are created in the image of God...and for that reason we have value...all of us.

Advocates of LGBTQ rights often accuse their critics of living in the past, specifically in the Dark or the Middle Ages. In my case, I am guilty as charged. Indeed, while revising my Medieval Church lectures over Christmas, I was reminded of just how medieval I am by the new book from Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual. The book tells the story of individualism from ancient Greece to the late Middle Ages, with the major focus being on the latter. It also sheds unexpected light on some of the most pressing of modern political issues.

Siedentop’s central thesis is provocative and plausible, though inevitably in need of further documentation and argument. In essence it is this: Christianity, by stressing the equality of all human beings before God effectively undermined previous categories which divided up or stratified society. Family, polis, and social hierarchy were all ultimately relativized in the light of the concept of a universal human nature.

Perhaps the key figure in Siedentop’s narrative is Duns Scotus who carefully distinguished between the freedom of the will to act and the notion of justice. Freedom to act was a necessary condition of moral behavior but not a sufficient condition: Acts also needed to be in conformity with what was just. Scotus thus gave conceptual clarity to the relationship between the individual human agent and the common standards of moral action rooted in shared human nature. 

Scotus was himself an epistemological realist, but his conceptual innovations helped pave the way for the nominalism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as espoused most famously by William of Occam. Of course, Siedentop’s narrative is selective and focused in a way that cuts through much of the complexity of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is for others to provide the subtlety and the detail. But his thesis, bold as it is, seems persuasive. It is also noteworthy for its attention to social, political, and economic aspects of what is primarily the history of an idea.

His argument is also helpful for understanding aspects of modern politics. For example, it offers yet one more reason why the current debate about the politics of sexual identity is fundamentally discontinuous with the Civil Rights struggle of the fifties and sixties, despite the noisy claims to the contrary made by many. 

The Civil Rights movement was built on the egalitarian assumption that African Americans shared with those of European ancestry a common humanity which transcended and ultimately undermined racial categories; by contrast, LGBTQ politics assumes that self-determined individual sexual identity trumps everything. It is thus built not on the foundation of a common humanity but on the priority of the individual’s will.

This is not a stance unique to LGBTQ activists. In fact, it is one of the major assumptions in the contemporary political climate. Much of modern politics—right and left—operates with an impoverished, solipsistic definition of selfhood. The result is that we have lost the classic liberal balance between the constraints rooted in the concept of a shared humanity and the rights of the individual. The late modern self would seem to be understood primarily as a self-determining agent whose desires are curbed only by the principle of consent when brought into relationship with the desires of another self-determining agent.

Contemporary society is gambling that the principle of consent will be enough to maintain some kind of viable long-term social ethic. But if we extend Siedentop’s analytical narrative to the era of late modernity, the principle of consent looks like little more than the last, flimsy vestige of an earlier moral discourse built on a richer understanding of a shared human nature. After all, consent implies that there must be something held in common between two or more parties which gives them commensurability. In other words, the principle of consent is built on a foundation which has already been demolished, and its continued plausibility has more to do with social tastes than philosophical coherence.

This demolition of the concept of human nature started centuries ago and is now firmly ensconced in art, in literature, in social and material relations, and in legal and political institutions and the standard news and entertainment media narratives. It thus has tremendous momentum. Anyone wishing to defend the unborn or traditional marriage has a much greater task on their hands than that faced by those who oppose them on these issues. The consensus of historic thinking may well be on our side, but the dynamics of historical process are far otherwise.

Still, there is some ironic comfort here: The advocates of LGBTQ rights are clearly living in the Middle Ages as much as their opponents. So perhaps that is one piece of rhetorical abuse that can now be set aside.

Carl R. Trueman is Paul Woolley Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary.

Some of the good from 2014

Did I mention I have the most amazing siblings?

Three brothers and one sister.

Why do I say they are amazing?

Mom died one year ago. Our Dad had died in 1992, at the young age of 59.

As I have written here, we had to go through the process of sorting all our Mom's stuff.  Deciding what to give to whom.

Many families can't do this task.  It has the potential to create a lot of conflict.

My siblings were amazing.

There was no conflict.

We took what things were personal mementos, and gave away the rest.

Everything that was done, was done with thoughtfulness and kindness...with regard for each other rather than just "ourselves".

My brother John commented that not all families could do what we did...and it was a testimony to the upbringing by our parents.

But I think it was more than just that.

My brothers and sister are just plain amazing and kind people.

The silver lining in a year of much pain.

2014: It is well

Through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
Through it all, through it all
It is well
Through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
It is well with me