Monthly Archives: April 2008

Not too in love with the President right now…

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“When the Texas Rangers [professional baseball] opportunity came along [1989], Bush was a man of modest wealth….Young Bush got on the telephone and raised money from truly wealthy investors to buy the team. He bought a two-percent stake for $600,000 using borrowed money….

“One of the first moves was to threaten to move the Rangers out of Arlington….The tactic worked. Bush and his allies arranged for a special referendum, held in January. Arlington voters were asked to approve a half-cent increase in the sales tax….

“The Bush investor group hired professional campaign consultants — Democrats — to manage the election. The opposition, predictably, objected to higher taxes. More than that, they protested that it was just not right for people rich enough to finance their own stadium to force others to buy it for them. The campaign pros, with $130,000 to spend, easily rolled over the barely organized local opposition in the special referendum….

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My first (partial) book gig ever

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Here’s the cover, and here is George’s commendation.  As he says, I came into the project especially for the chapter on nineteenth century missions.  It was an honor to be part of it because, for a small book, it was in my view an important one.

I have been bothering Jay about producing a generic form of Theologia‘s template so I can use it for a business site.  Then I saw what Jandy discovered, and decided that was direction to go (considering this blog’s present template, I’m was kind of embarrassed to do so, but I didn’t see anything comparable…).  Of course, when Jandy said it required “fiddling” with the code, I didn’t use our relative skills to adjust the translation.  I suspect the site will be under construction for some time to come.

Nevertheless, both markhorne.com and scrollquill.com go there.  And I’ll probably be posting entries here that will be meant to go there eventually.

The two-step problem with the “Imputation of the Active Obedience” slogan

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  1. It leaves one completely mystified as to why Christ had to die.
  2. It then generates nuclear-physics level complication in rationalization explanation as to how the basic Gospel is compromised by anyone who doesn’t promote IAO.

I think there IAO makes sense within the comprehensive claims of Christ as representative head, but that isn’t strong enough for the loud advocates of IAO.

Ramble: free-market ideal of individual economic freedom has to be a novelty

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Individual economic freedom: I’m all for it, being me and all.

But I doubt it had that much relevance to, say, the American Revolution (which I think counts as a revolution because, rather than fighting the king to force him to acknowledge their rights, they simply cut off the king to enforce their rights for themselves–I’m not judging this one way or another, just recognizing the revolutionary step). It may have had a bit. It all depends when you date the industrial revolution and how far you date it at the time.

I had, coming out of college, more or less seen individual liberty as a progress of constitutional recognitions of rights that could be tracked as a series of political wins. For example, the Magna Carta would be a part of this heritage.

But, at the same time, being deeply immersed in libertarian/”capitalist” theory/propaganda, I more or less correlated or even smudged this with economic individual liberty. Free individuals making free choices about price, purchase, investment, and risk were the key ingredient in a prosperous and civilized community.

But to even begin thinking that way, there is a necessary precondition: It must be widely understood that your carreer is largely undetermined and unconstrained by your father’s career. Otherwise, it simply makes no sense. If you are a blacksmith because your father is a blacksmith dealing with landlords and with farmers whose lives have been determined the same way, then you are not going to think much about the freedom of “a person” as an individual needing economic freedom. You will think of yourself as a member of a class that is trying to find a correct fit with other classes.

You will think this way because anything else would be irrelevant and stupid.

You go to the bookstore and you will find a whole industry on how to choose a career, how to measure your gifts/skills/proclivities/turn-ons, how to present yourself and find your place in the economy. Did this literature even exist in the 1770s. Maybe Poor Richard’s Almanac was the start. Maybe geographic displacements make this sort of thinking more likely. Maybe. But I doubt it was that common compared to the 1850s. And so on. Continue reading →

Instead of blogging

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I’m not sure how often I will be blogging here (I’m not promising anything, just noticing. If you want to keep up with me, this might be much more productive. It is also on the side bar. I’m at the point that I’m thinking of letting people know on tumblr when I blog here.

Tumblr, by the way, seems like it should be a ton more popular than twitter. But I have friends on twitter so….

This got through my ego-surfing net

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From Doug Wilson:

He begins with a discussion of his appreciation of systematic theology, and likes the fact that I believe systematics are inescapable, which I certainly do. Connected to this is Lane’s appreciation of the Protestant scholastics. He likes what I said about this general topic, but takes other FV guys to task for disparaging the scholastics. I have seen some of that, but I have also seen numerous positive FV citations from the scholastics — Mark “Turretin” Horne comes to mind. These are easy to forget because the Protestant scholastics frequently say things that would get them in trouble in Mississippi Valley Presbytery. But they did write them, and FV guys have quoted them with pleasure and satisfaction.

I’m not the only one.  Back during the Shepherd controversy when he was still at Westminster Philadelphia, an attacker wrote against him to the seminary saying there was no precedent for Shepherd’s views, except in Turretin, who was really just a rationalist.

And I am totally loving the new middle name.