How to kill the liberal arts: a thread

1. In the name of "efficiency," require each academic unit to be independently profitable ("revenue positive"). This, of course, is not a pedagogical decision; but cover that with threats about "survival" (Schmitt's "emergency situation"). 2. You thereby make consumer choice the voice of God.

My hunch re: a story that a journalist/sociologist should pursue: The pandemic as a stress-test of U.S. Christian congregations as measured by giving/budgets, and how giving reflects formation.

Intuition & hypothesis in thread (1/?): I keep hearing claims that many congregations won’t survive the pandemic shutdown *fiscally*. Curious about this, b/c in our congregation (basically mainline Protestant), giving remains strong, even up during pandemic (thx to lots of automated giving commitments).

While the pandemic is pushing churches to forms of digital/remote worship, you’d expect this to foster disembodiment, giving license for further “ex-carnation” as Charles Taylor puts it.

But I’m seeing the opposite: remote worship is revivifying the *parish*.

Let me explain. As everyone worships online, it would be easy for everyone to act like consumers and flit to other productions and streams—you can “go to church” anywhere, in a sense. No doubt some are doing that.

But I’m also seeing people even more hungry to worship with their congregations.

There is now an entire industry of writers who leverage their insider experiences of evangelicalism/Catholicism/Mormonism, etc to confirm the biases of secularist, anti-religious elites.

This is my least favorite religious writers market & I’m trying to figure out why. I’m not talking about the ex- genre of memoirs that parade their subsequent enlightenment. (Yawn.) Instead...

This is my first 4th of July as a U.S. citizen and I’m feeling a bit like Carmela Soprano who said she knew exactly what she was getting into with Tony, but she didn’t know if she loved him “in spite of it or because of it.” But choosing to become a U.S. citizen was an act of intellectual honesty for me: embracing, and taking responsibility for, this “experiment” which is its own pharmakon, as Jacques Derrida might put it: both medicine and poison. (And Jacques loved his Yale & Irvine appointments.)

Loyalty is not an institutional virtue.

Let me try to explain. A virtue is an excellence; or more specifically, it is a habitual disposition towards a telos that is specified as good, hence the habit is affirmed as “excellent.” So if you have a habit that inclines you toward the good, you have a virtue.

Timely observations from @ahc here: thegospelcoalition.org/article/time-r….

Related considerations:

1. Does ecclesiastical polity matter here? Does evangelicalism’s penchant for freelance, non-denom start-up congregations make it susceptible to this in unique ways? Not that episcopacy is any magical guarantee against abuse (see: Rome). But worth considering whether Presbyterian ecclesiastical polity (for example) is a check & balance that non-denoms lack.