Lovey-Dovey

You can’t judge a book by its cover. Judging by its cover, Love: Christian Romance, Marriage, and Friendship, by Princeton Christian philosopher Diogenes Allen, looks like it falls in the same general area as The 5 Love Languages or some other self-help book. Looks, as they say, are deceiving.

Allen actually traverses some of the terrain as other important works, most notably The Four Loves, by C. S. Lewis. In Allen’s case, he taps into the Western tradition to help explain in a deeper way what usually gets flattened or trivialized for mass consumption in most books on this topic. Allen takes the humanities seriously, and in the first few chapters of the  book, he refers to the following writers:

Denis de Rougemont on courtly love

Plato (Phaedrus)

St. John of the Cross

Coleridge (“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”)

Genesis

Kierkegaard

Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman)

Dante

Bonaventure

Martin Luther

Allen does not write as the Princetonian scholar, though. He wants to make accessible to a more general audience some of the fundamental Christian insights into the nature of love in its multiple dimensions. A work like this shows that “The Western Tradition” is much more than a dull section of humanities credits required to knock out an undergraduate degree. Allen shows that ancient Greeks, Medieval Catholics, modern Protestants, and literary works of all kinds have the power to illuminate the most fundamental reality of all human beings (“Love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself”).

The Western Tradition was generated for a reason. It is not a unified, monolithic voice, and it still communicates profoundly about our own day to day concerns for loving and being loveable. Why study good literature, philosophy, and theology? So you can love your wife better. So you can love your kids better. So you can love God better.

American Rhetoric

The rhetorical tradition is absolutely central to the Western tradition. The Apostle Paul was obviously educated in that tradition, given his highly literate use of various rhetorical devices throughout his letters. The early Church Fathers, such as Augustine and Chrysostom, employed traditional rhetoric while re-tooling it for specific ecclesiastical needs (homilies, teachings, biblical exegesis). The Reformation was fueled in part by a return to classical rhetoric (Melancthon, Luther’s right-hand man, wrote a widely influential textbook on the subject).

In the modern era,  writers as various as C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Frederick Buechner, and Annie Dillard use the full complement of rhetorical techniques to  move us and instruct us.

Here is a useful guide to rhetoric as it surrounds us in the American tradition: American Rhetoric.

This site is full of helpful features, such as a speech bank of famous American speeches, apologetics link, and –my favorite part of the site—examples of speechifying in movies. The other part of this site I like is the “rhetorical figures in sound,” in which you hear a variety of speakers, many who are famous, display figures of speech. Enjoy.

Across the Pond

American Christianity has always had to wrestle with a triumphalist streak, whether in conservative or liberal forms. To gain some perspective on this problem, it helps to look outside our American inflections of Christianity to other cultural positionings of faith. One way to do this appears on the U.K. web site bethinking. Since Christians in the U.K. are now a distinct minority in an increasingly hostile and aggressive secular culture, their wrestlings with faith and culture can inform our own in helpful ways. Take a look. 

Here is a sample essay called "A Media Studies Approach to Not Noticing God." In it, Pete Lowman reflects on how modern media trains everyone--even Christians--to see the world in purely material cause-effect ways, effectively shutting down our intuition of supernatural realities.

Thinking Christianly

Is there a Christian view of communication? Is there a Christian understanding of powerpoint?

Is powerpoint bad for you?

Speaking of Classical

Jay Heinrichs' book Thank You For Arguing is a nice introduction to how classical rhetoric can be repackaged for life in the 21st Century. The subtitle of the book, "What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion," points to the wide-ranging nature of the book. Heinrichs sometimes comes off a bit too cute here and there, but the book as a whole is a superb introduction to the power of classical rhetoric.

The book is broken up into numerous chapters, each of which explains a piece of classical rhetoric, supplying examples and summaries. It's a very useful tool either to gain an introduction to the discipline or to refresh one's familiarity with the nuts and bolts of how rhetoric can work in daily life.

Here in this season of political upheaval, it is also a good handbook on how bad some arguments can get, even while those arguments persuade people who don't know how to think through arguments.

A Helpful Resource

The web now hosts a huge number of reference works on just about any topic, so The Dictionary of the History of Ideas might not be the most amazing thing one can find online. But it is useful, so you might want to bookmark it for future use, even if your use of it is sporadic.

Take, for example, "The Faust Theme". It isn't as much fun as thumbing through a big, heavy book, but it can be useful for filling in gaps in one's learning.