No matter how many reasons there might be for doing so, I cannot give up my New York Times habit. I must have it every morning, and if for some reason I don't get I feel like the world is going on without me. The habit started when I moved back from Canada in 2000 and started adjuncting at Michigan State. In Canada I had gotten into the habit of reading the Toronto Globe & Mail every morning at Tim Horton's, and when I came back it seemed like the best equivalent in the States was the NYT. Though people from around here, evangelically-oriented Grand Rapids, tend to look down their noses at it, I have gained an invaluable education from my daily perusal of its pages. Its supposed liberal bias is much exaggerated by the Fox News folks, and though it has declined in some areas, and has had problems with journalistic malfeasance in recent years, I think that I could make a pretty good argument that it still at least tries to hold to the highest standards in of journalistic ethics and comprehensive coverage. In other words, it is far from perfect, but it is still the best we've got (admittedly I do not look at such papers at the LA Times on a regular basis). The San Francisco Chronicle is good in certain ways, but not as consistently readable as NYT.

Anyway, today's paper is just one example of what I am talking about. Fridays are my favorite NYT days, but this morning was just superb: A "Listening With Ornette Coleman" piece in the Weekend Arts section (I didn't know he was still alive!); a very balanced review (more balanced than I would have been) of the new movie "Jesus Camp"; an essay by William Grimes on the latest books about reading, e.g., Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer"; and continuation of a series on the relationship between political campaigns and churches in America. The op-ed page is always a mish-mash of points of view, with David Brooks taking the bourgeois-conservative angle, John Tierney representing Libertarians, Thomas Friedman covering international issues in his sometimes off-putting but always thought-provoking way, Paul Krugman smashing the Bush administration for one thing or another, and Maureen Dowd being alternately too-cute and piercingly acute. What more can one ask for in a daily newspaper that is always available by 6:30 in the heart of the heartland?

Jacques Ellul and Morality

I have been reading Jacques Ellul's "The Subversion of Christianity" lately, and one of the most striking points he makes is that Christianity is not a system of morals, and that it is in fact opposed to all mere "systems" of morality. All systems of morality, he says, arise from mankind's attempts to order themselves apart from God's Law and Kingship. Thus morality is a human attribute, but not a specifically Christian one. Or, in other words, people (like Muslims!)can be moral apart from Christianity. The puzzling part of this is that he does not say that moral systems should be entirely done away with. I guess he has a pragmatic approach and believes that people basically work out the best morality for themselves among themselves, and that this is a necessary part of being human. Living as a disciple of Christ, though, he says, requires one to maintain an ironic distance from all such human systems of behavior-ordering, since one might be required at any time to do something that goes against the accepted morality. God's righteousness (which transcends all moral systems) calls us to a higher purpose than merely being moral. Thus, Christ did not die in order to give us a better moral system. He died in order to give us new lives -- lives characterized by freedom, creativity, and (oftentimes) dissent from the prevailing systems.

More on this in a later post.