Missing the Forest for the Moral Checklist

In a previous post about The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I got around to saying that industry, like slavery, has not served us well.

I don't think that Industry and Slavery are perfectly analogous.  Like I said before (in the aforementioned post), there are no perfect analogies in history.  By nature, history doesn't allow for it: history is a sequence of absolutely unique events.  History is not a science, and we cannot treat it like one.  As N.T. Wright pointed out - in one of his Christian Origins books; I'm not about to flip through thousands of pages to tell you right now, but it was probably The Resurrection of the Son of God - 'Caesar's Crossing of the Rubicon' happened once and for all; it is not the sort of phenomenon you can repeat and therefore test.  Science, an empirical art, requires exact duplication.  History forbids it.

I digress. So Industry and Slavery are unique in history and not perfectly analogous.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't be learning by comparing them, because all analogies must at some point break down, anyway - but not necessarily before they prove their worth.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Thoughts

Reading Frederick Douglass's narrative was one of those things I've been putting off for years.  But I did it, I finally did it.  And boy was it worth it.  I had an inkling it would be, though, because what made me want to read it in the first place was a lecture I heard on Douglass's very brief story -- so, keep in mind, some of what I'm going to write today I've heard somewhere else, from my friend Rob, to be precise.

I visited Dutch L'Abri a couple of summers ago, and it was there that I heard Rob give his impressions of Douglass's very moving story.  In case you haven't heard of it, it's the story of an escaped slave, published before the Civil War in the year 1845.  But for a couple of reasons (and probably more than these, but this is just off the top of my head and having just finished the book), the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is no ordinary escaped-slave-tale.

'Feminism, the Body, and the Machine:' An Essay by Wendell Berry

Once a year, I read this essay by Wendell Berry.  I've been doing this for a few years now, and that time rolled around again this summer, much to my delight.  (Yes, I do get the irony of my blogging about Wendell Berry.)

The essay was written in response to angry comments regarding an article Berry had previously written in Harper's, comments claiming that Berry was decidedly un-feminist. In the previous article, which I have also read -- on why he does not own a computer, Berry had mentioned that his wife does some editing work for him.  Apparently, this displeased many so-called feminists, who were of the opinion that his wife, because of this, was made a 'drudge.'