Articles New, Articles Forthcoming, and Something More Exciting

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Unfortunately, a series of unforeseen pressures on my time (some of them coming in the form of malevolent microorganisms) have forced me to abandon my blogging ambitions for this month; I still hope that next month will see a return to more writing here, but a number of academic writing commitments will get in the way.

However, I have not been idle, and I do have a number of publications that have just recently come out or are forthcoming.  Unfortunately, many of them you will need institutional journal subscriptions, a lot of money, or a good library to read, but someday, the open-access revolution may burst them out from the closely guarded paywall prisons in which they now reside.  The last and most exciting item, however, will be very widely and inexpensively available:

Fall 2013:

A review of Scott Kindred-Barnes, Richard Hooker’s Use of History in His Defense of Public Worship: His Anglican Critique of Calvin, Barrow, and the Puritans for the Journal of Anglican Studies.  Published online 9/27/13 here.

A review of A.J. Joyce’s Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology for the Anglican Theological Review 95.4 (Fall 2013): 734–36.  Some of you will recall that I reviewed this book at length here last spring.  But if you want the concise version, in which my caustic criticisms are thinly veiled in polite academese, the journal review may interest you.

Winter 2014:

A review of Peter Leithart’s Between Babel and Beast for Political Theology 15.1 (Jan. 2014): 10–12.  Again, I have blogged about this book in a number of places, and reviewed it for Reformation21 last summer, but this is the concise, academic version.

A book chapter, “Bancroft versus Penry: Conscience and Authority in Elizabethan Polemics,” appearing in the very exciting new volume edited by W.J. Torrance Kirby, Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520-1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).  And trust me, it really is a very exciting new volume, bringing together historians, theologians, English literature scholars, architectural history scholars, etc. to paint a picture of the enormous cultural impact of the open-air pulpit outside St. Paul’s Cathedral throughout the events that laid the foundation for modern Britain and Anglophone Protestantism.  My essay looks at how the complex dynamics of authority in church and state, conscience, and Christian liberty played out in a sermon by arch-conformist Richard Bancroft and the published critique by John Penry in 1589-90.

An article for a more popular audience in a new journal, The Statesman, entitled, “Three Things Conservatives Could Learn from Richard Hooker.” Forthcoming Feb. 2014.

Spring 2014:

An article, “More than a Swineherd: Hooker, Vermigli, and an Aristotelian Defence of the Royal Supremacy” that will be appearing in Reformation and Renaissance Review 15.1 (April 2014): 78–93.  This is going to be a spectacular special issue of RRR, guest-edited by my friend Jordan Ballor and focusing on the life and thought of the great Florentine reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli.  My friends Eric Parker and Simon Burton also have excellent articles in this issue—indeed, so excellent that I’m a little embarrassed for my little contribution to be appearing alongside theirs.  My article looks at how, in an argumentative strategy that turns many stereotypes on their heads, both Peter Martyr Vermigli and Richard Hooker deploy Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics in order to establish a Christian monarch’s responsibility to care for and advance the church in his realm.  This realization carries lots of exciting implications for our understanding of early modern Protestant political theology, and also strongly suggests something I want to work out more fully in later research—that Richard Hooker was deeply influenced by Vermigli’s work.

There are a few other articles and book reviews I’ve got coming down the pipeline, but I don’t have a very good idea of publication dates, so I’ll leave those out, and skip to the big news…

Spring 2015:

Littlejohn.RichardHooker.Littlejohn.RichardHooker.47351Richard Hooker: A Guide to His Life and Thought.  A new book in the Cascade Companions series, to be published by Cascade Books.  These are short (120-200 page) books aimed at a wide audience—students, pastors, church book studies, and more—that seek to introduce the work of important thinkers, texts, movements in the Christian tradition.  Cascade has just sent me the contract to write this, and I’m proposing to finish it within a year.

My provisional Table of Contents (with very pithy, very un-Hookerian chapter titles) at present is as follows

 

 

 

Pt. I: Richard Hooker

1. The Legend

2. The Man

3. The Book

Pt. II: Vision and Aims

4. Protestant

5. Polemicist

6. Philosopher

7. Pastor

Pt. III: Key Theological Issues

8. Salvation

9. Law

10. Scripture

11. Church

Pt. IV: Legacy

12. Richard Hooker: Contemporary

Stay tuned for more news, as this and other projects develop.

 

Rigged to Win

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Since Christmas, I’ve been working my way slowly through George Packer’s masterpiece The Unwinding, which chronicles the slow decay of American society and politics over the past generation in poignant prose that follows the struggles and triumphs of a handful of more-or-less-ordinary citizens, using them to illuminate the story of a nation.  It climaxes with the events following the 2008 financial crisis, which revealed how thoroughly corporate money and power had taken the American political process captive.  This passage was particularly eye-opening:

“The previous October, in the last month of the [Obama] campaign, Connaughton had picked up signs from [Delaware senator] Kaufman that the Obama team wanted to bring Robert Rubin on as Treasury secretary.  ‘Don’t you realize that half the country wants to hang Bob Rubin?’ Connaughton asked when Kaufman expressed enthusiasm at the prospect.  Kaufman would later say, ‘It was like a car had broken down and we needed a mechanic.’  Obama, inexperienced in government and a novice in finance, seemed to believe that Rubin and his followers were the only competent repairmen available.

No more proof was needed that the establishment . . . would emerge from the disaster in fine shape.  The establishment could fail and fail and still survive, even thrive.  It was rigged to win, like a casino, and once you were on the inside, you had to do something dramatic to lose your standing. . . . Rubin was no longer viable for Treasury, but his people were practically the only candidates under consideration by Obama, who, after all, had fought his way into the establishment from farther back than any of them.  Michael Froman, Rubin’s chief of staff under Clinton, later a managing director at Citigroup, introduced Rubin to Obama, and he continued working at the bank while serving on Obama’s transition as personnel director, then collected a $2.25 million bonus before joining the administration.  Jacob Lew, another Citigroup executive, became deputy secretary of state with a $900,000 bonus in his pocket.  Mark Patterson, a Goldman Sachs lobbyist, was hired as chief of staff at Treasury despite the lobbying ban.  Timothy Geithner, a Rubin protégé and the architect of the bailouts, was appointed Treasury secretary and survived the revelation that he had flagrantly underpaid taxes to the agency he was going to lead.  Larry Summers, whose meaty fingerprints were all over the pro-bank policies of the late nineties, and who earned millions in speaking fees from various future bailout recipients, became the leading economic adviser at the Obama White House.  Even Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, a career public servant, had made a cool $16.5 million at a Chicago investment bank in the thirty months he spent between government jobs.  All at the top of their field, all brilliant and educated to within an inch of their lives, all Democrats, all implicated in an epic failure—now hired to sort out the ruins.  How could they not see things the way of the bankers with whom they’d studied and worked and ate and drunk and gotten rich?  Social promotion and conflict of interest were built into the soul of the meritocracy.  The Blob was unkillable.”

Working for All You’re Worth: Some More Thoughts on the Minimum Wage Debate

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief reflection on the recent debates over the minimum wage for Capital Commentary.  My purpose there, and in the several conversations I’ve had in social media on this question, was not really to advocate for or against raising the minimum wage; in my view, the economic and political complexities of the issue are such that I’m inclined to be suspicious of anyone who’s confident they know the right answer to the question.  My main concern is to call out really bad arguments against the minimum wage, particularly those peddled by Christians.  There may well be a good case to make against the minimum wage, but it seems awfully hard to find people making it sometimes.

So I want to reflect a bit more fully on what’s wrong with one of the common conservative arguments against the minimum wage: that the laborer is only worth his productivity.  The argument goes something like this: Sure, it sounds wonderful to pay people a living wage, but a worker’s job is to contribute productivity to a business, adding value by his labor, and ultimately, the business cannot afford to pay him any more than what he brings in.  If a McDonald’s worker can only contribute an average of $6 profit per hour to the company by his labor, then McDonald’s will go broke pretty quick paying him $10/hr.  Accordingly, raising the minimum wage will simply increase unemployment, and instead, therefore, we should focus on raising worker productivity.  So Acton’s Joe Carter says,

“Instead, we should focus on faster economic growth and improving productivity of low-skilled workers. By increasing the value of a worker’s labor, we make it possible for them not only to feed their family but also to help fulfill the needs and desires of their neighbors….The goal should not be to merely give people a living wage but to help them gain the ability to make a life for themselves based on the value of their labor. What the working poor need most is marketable skills and productive jobs, not more handouts disguised as ‘wages.'”   

Now, arguments like this have a weaker, pragmatic form, and a stronger, moral form.  The moral version, favored by doctrinaire free marketeers, argues that a laborer ought not to be paid more than his productivity, which marks the just price of his labor—as someone put it to me in a Facebook discussion, “if you can’t find somebody who values your labor at $X/hr., then you have no right to employment.”  The pragmatic version would be: “It’s a cold hard world out there, and the fact is that the only way you’re going to get McDonald’s to employ people at $10/hr. is by making their labor worth $10/hr.”    There are problems with both versions, but I will begin by tackling the moral problem.

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Working for All You’re Worth: Some More Thoughts on the Minimum Wage Debate

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief reflection on the recent debates over the minimum wage for Capital Commentary.  My purpose there, and in the several conversations I’ve had in social media on this question, was not really to advocate for or against raising the minimum wage; in my view, the economic and political complexities of the issue are such that I’m inclined to be suspicious of anyone who’s confident they know the right answer to the question.  My main concern is to call out really bad arguments against the minimum wage, particularly those peddled by Christians.  There may well be a good case to make against the minimum wage, but it seems awfully hard to find people making it sometimes.

So I want to reflect a bit more fully on what’s wrong with one of the common conservative arguments against the minimum wage: that the laborer is only worth his productivity.   Read More