Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. Matthew 7:6, KJV.
As you can almost tell, even with the way I cropped the picture, this is a front yard display. It is in my neighborhood in the sense that I drive by it on 35th Avenue every morning on my way to Starbucks. And one morning at Starbucks, my friend Paul McKay said, “Hey, you know that house on 35th that has that pig in the front yard? You know what that is? It’s ‘pearls before swine,’ like in Matthew.”
I hadn’t ever seen that because you don’t see the “pearls” from the road. They are too small. I took this picture standing in their front yard. From the road, you see only the large white spheres and I just assumed they were mushrooms. This is a truffle hunting pig, I guess. Once Paul said they were pearls, I went there and saw for myself. They are pearls.
Ordinarily, that would be the end of the story. It really should be the end of the story, but as I got to thinking about this very short and ambiguous text, I remembered a record (45 rpm) from my own youth. It is by Johnny Standley and it’s called “It’s in the Book.” [1] Standley plays the part of a southern revival evangelist, with the overdone gestures and the quavery voice. The part I am interested in today—the part, that is, that comes before his leading his imaginary congregation in a hymn called “Grandma’s Lye Soap”—is his exegesis of “Little Bo Peep.” He gives it all:
Little Bo Peep/Has lost her sheep/And doesn’t know where to find them/Leave them alone and they’ll come home/ Wagging their tails behind them.
Then he works each phrase in that tremulous mock-sincere voice. He notes how sad it is that Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep. He is offended that the text says both that she has lost them AND that she does not know where to find them. That seems obvious to Preacher Standley. If she has lost them then obviously, she doesn’t know where to find them. But after all, “It’s in the Book.”
Then he comes to the advice “the Book” offers her. “Leave them alone.” He muses over that a little. If she doesn’t know where to find them, what else could she possibly do than leave them alone?
And finally, he gets to “they’ll come home (“Ah yes,” he assures us, “there’ll be a brighter day tomorrow; they WILL come home.”) wagging their tails behind them. “Behind them,” he repeats with emphasis. “Did we think they’d wag them in front?”
OK, you get the idea. That is the attitude that came back to me when my friend Paul deciphered the front yard display of the “pearls before swine.” When I began thinking about “pearls before swine” with Preacher Johnny Standley whispering in my ear about Little Bo Peep, I began to think of quibbles that might be made. Five came immediately to mind. [2]
So the question is this: in the prohibition recorded in Matthew 7:6, what exactly is prohibited and does this display violate those prohibitions?
Quibble 1: I learned when I started playing with this that in English, the word swine may be either singular or plural. In English, we can say “that swine” or “those swine.” That’s not true in Greek: tōn choirōn, which is the Greek expression translated “swine,” is plural. Of course, “they” indicates that we are talking about a number of pigs, as in “they will turn again and rend you” and I could have figured it out that way. But I didn’t.
So does this display illustrate a casting of pearls before swine (pl.)? No. Obviously, there is only one pig here.
Quibble 2: What is the rationale given? It is implied that there is something inappropriate about casting something valuable before animals, especially ritually impure animals. But beyond what is implied, only one part of the rationale is certain and that is that it is dangerous. “They might,” Jesus implies, “do you harm.” Now if that is something that herds of pigs do but that individual pigs do not do, then casting pearls before this particular pig might be completely safe and since safety is the only explicit criterion, I would say that this display does not show anything Jesus forbade.
Quibble 3: It says not to cast your own pearls before the swine, but it doesn’t say anything about casting anyone else’s pearls. I can see that there are pearls there in the front yard, but I have no way of knowing whose they are. It is entirely possible that Matthew meant to represent Jesus as saying, “Remember now. Don’t throw your sister’s pearls before swine.” That would be a very prudent piece of advice—almost as prudential as the previous one.
Quibble 4: Does this display show pearls that were cast before “the pigs,” or even this one pig? Certainly not. They may have been cast there. They may have been dropped accidentally. They may have been placed there with great care. There is no way to know that they were “thrown.” Of course, they might have been.
Quibble 5: Does this show pearls that were cast before the swine? Unfortunately, no. It shows that they are now before the swine. It is entirely possible that the pearls were cast behind the swine and that the swine turned around. They do that. I have seen it myself.
And in closing, a final word on silliness. It turns out that Matthew 7:6 has some really interesting meanings—serious meanings—that I was entirely unaware of. You can be as committed to silly as you like, apparently, and it doesn’t keep really interesting ideas at bay.
[1] I remembered (incorrectly) that Andy Griffith had done that recording. I think I was confusing it with his “What it Was Was Football,” which was released about the same time. I remembered correctly that Griffith was known at the time as Deacon Andy Griffith.
[2] I do, from time to time write on scriptural topics in unconventional ways. I remember the time I invented Dewey Decimal classifications for the “books” of the Bible. Today’s musing isn’t one of those. This is just silly.
nomination—there has been a lot of talk about “authoritarianism.” On behalf of the political scientists of the world, let me invite you to the discussion. We talk about authoritarianism pretty much all the time. It’s just that this year, some of our stuff is landing on editorial pages and is being read by a broader audience.
In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil [1], Hannah Arendt raises the question of whether Adolf Eichmann was, himself, anti-Semitic. As I read her, the answer is either “No, he was not,” or “He might have been but it didn’t matter to his work.” [2] Arendt came very close to saying that Eichmann really wasn’t bright enough to be a thoroughgoing anti-Semite. She does say, clearly and repeatedly, that Eichmann’s operation of the Nazi death camps would not have been altered by so much as a single Jew if he actually had been an anti-Semite.
history in which a bold “take no prisoners” kind of leader is required. Imagine for a moment that you are the superintendent of a school district and that one of your school is a chaotic mess filled with incorrigible students. You may have the most fanciful liberal arts dreams in mind for this school, but first you are going to have to establish law and order. So you choose a law and order principal. He is flamboyant. He drives a fire engine red sports car which has a driver’s side door fitted with a scabbard for his Winchester. He encourages his teachers to carry guns in class. The parents who are desperate for order are enthusiastic and reduce his offenses to mere peccadilloes. The others are horrified that some blowhard clown is in charge of their kids’ high school.
Wendy Lustbader has written more sensibly about aging than anyone I have read for a long time and in a recent issue of Generations (2014) she wrote a piece called “It All Depends on What You Mean by Home.” Isn’t it the truth!
But among people who have known you for a long time, there is a broader kind of acceptance and it is based on a broader kind of knowledge. People who have known you for a long time know “who you really are,” not just how you seem in the afternoon after your nap. “How he is after his nap” is part of what friends know about you. “He’ll be fine,” they will say, “Just give him a little time.”
There are two things worth noting here. The first is the way Johnson sets the hook in the reader. “Did you ever have an experience like this?” he says. Nearly every Christian I know has had experiences like that. If you mix with the general public, it is pretty likely that you are going to be in a conversation where the idiocy, the arrogance, and the utter hypocrisy of religious belief are going to be taken for granted. Your own consequent idiocy, arrogance and hypocrisy are obvious applications of this view. That isn’t fun at all.
has nothing to do with religion and b) I am part of the group of friends.
So the lesson embedded in this setting of the story is: Let it pass and see what happens.
group. But a person who feels unable to do either of those might still feel that something should be done and that person might think of saying, “Remember when you were talking and laughing about how stupid religious people are? That really hurt my feelings and I wish you would be more careful and not do that any more.”
on that is going to choose Donald Trump as the nominee of “the Republican party.” Notice the quotation marks. Ryan is the highest ranking Republican. He is behind only Joe Biden as “our next President.” [1] He is as close to Mr. Republican as anyone can be. He looks pensive, don’t you think?
I think of “agenda” and “Trump” in the way I think of the agenda of the Earp brothers at the OK Corral. If there is an agenda there, it is “get them before they have a chance to get you.” Grand Old Party? Really?
[1] And if you can’t imagine what it would be like for a conservative Republican Speaker of the House to move seamlessly into the Oval Office and start “presidenting,” then you owe it to yourself to see John Goodman do it as Glen Alan Walken in Season 4 of The West Wing. I found it disconcerting.
In this picture, we see the result of Haber’s suggestion that the world not be divided into warring groups by the color of their skin. George dreamed that everyone was gray and when he woke up, they all were—including Dr. Haber. I’m sure that seemed a good solution to a dreaming mind, however far from Haber’s mind it was. When George was instructed to bring “peace on earth,” he invented aliens and had them invade Earth. Problem solved.
You don’t have to walk very far to see these two signs. There is going to be a vote, apparently, on whether to “put” (Boo!) or to “restore” (Yea!) fluoride in the water. “Put” emphasizes the novelty. This is new. It could be dangerous. “Restore” emphasizes the familiarity. We used to have this. Remember how nice it was? We could have it again if we wanted.
Here’s the other sign. It just comes from the other side of the conflict, but it might almost have come from another planet. Notice first how the policy process flows. Back in the good old days, we had “healthy water.” [2] Presumably, we made the water “healthful” by adding fluoride to it. And the fluoride produced healthy water and the healthy water produced healthy teeth. They don’t say that, but you can see the healthy teeth.
I like to work in the area between those. I believe that it is reasonable and also useful to say that there are “kinds” or “categories” of marriages and that each kind has the norms of growth and health that are appropriate to it and therefor the kind of consummation that is appropriate to it.
Let’s start on the easy end of the scale and work up. Let’s say a young couple discover each other at a party by a beautiful lake and fall instantly in love. This is a really terrific feeling and their idea is that if they get married, they will continue to feel that way about each other. Marriage “locks in” the feelings of infatuation, in other words.
The balance is important because collegiality can decay into routine or even into drudgery. There’s nothing routine about a jolt of intimacy. Intimacy can decay into volatile emotions and loss of trust because when you go that far inside [5], neither of you knows what is there. The steady friendly pace of shared work is a wonderful balance to all that volatility.
When I think about the consummation of the kind of marriage we have, two things are immediately clear and were clear even from the beginning. The first is that it would take both of us working at it consistently to achieve it. I am thinking, for instance, of the kind of work it takes to make sure that our emotional bank account always has enough funds for us to draw on day by day. And, should it come to that, for emergencies as well.
ine that things would continue pretty much along the lines described in the earlier chapters. This one didn’t do that. That is what makes it so good for 2016.
Second, young people with a new vision of the kind of country we could be are the source of new values, values which are both more humanistic (not just anti-corporate) and more egalitarian.
Point 1: We have done very well with “continuing economic disorganization.” That’s why there are so many angry voters and why authoritarian candidates are so popular. And despite the rhetorical reliance on “the 1%,” we have not done at all well in seeing our dilemma in class-based terms. Class is important in this scenario because the group, gender, and racial/ethic conflicts can all be manipulated as distractions. Class, by this analysis, can not be a distraction and I can’t think of a substitute.
It is easy to remember the Democratic party as “the party of American liberalism,” and that is true as far as it goes. It is not so easy to remember that “the party of American liberalism” was held in power by the solid South. That Democratic party was the party of “I have a dream,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it and also of “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” as Gov. George Wallace of Alabama put it. Both in 1963, by the way.
to make them” in mind and search until they find a restaurant that offers that dish. They choose a “kind of restaurant:” vegetarian or Thai or, in Portland, Ethiopian and they go in and sit down and whatever happens is what happens.
The voters have organized themselves into two cohesive voting blocks. Now they are requiring that the parties become ideologically cohesive parties. And, partly in response to that, the parties are repelling each other [5] and becoming more and more different. The politicians who succeed within these highly polarized parties are the ones who best represent the polarized electorate. What Lind means by his headline is that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton best represent their respective parties. (I especially like this picture because of the alternation of foreground and background.)
moderate. The Democrats were “in favor of” civil rights in the south, for instance, and they “urged the southern states” to be more fair and moderate. They did not pass binding civil rights legislation and put money into implementing it. Not in those days. It would have…you know…split the party.
The Dilettante's Dilemma 