And if GOD'S FINAL VICTORY doesn't convince you...

...here's a nice look at one of the "proof texts" often invoked to support a doctrine of eternal damnation.

In the linked post, Trig Bundgaard turns to the original Greek text to argue that what is being talked about in Matthew 13:40-42 is a purging and redemptive process culminating in salvation, not a punitive rejection leading to endless fiery torment. Bundgaard's point isn't new, but he makes it concisely...and it's a point that apparently needs to be made repeatedly to a Christian community so steeped in the presumption that the Bible "clearly" teaches eternal damnation.

Both John and I have been intrigued by the fact that the Eastern Fathers--and the Eastern Orthodox Church through history--have been historically far more open to universalism than what we find in the Western Church. One explanation for this--an explanation that gets some added support from the considerations raised by Bundgaard--is that the Easter Fathers were reading the New Testament in the original Greek, in which translational issues would not obscure the original meaning.

Gregory of Nyssa's universalism is precisely the version of universalism we find emerging out of Bundgaard's reflection on Matthew 13:40-42: What the Western Church has conceived of as a place of burning punishment is, on the contrary, a refiner's fire--and those who are cast into it are cleansed and purified, and thereby saved.

There are different ways to unpack this refiner's fire metaphor. One can, for example, take it that the experience of alienation from God, at least if it is permitted to continue indefinitely, burns away any illusions and self-deception about what it actually means to exist in alienation from the source of all being and value. Those who choose such alienation are given what they choose, and it is through having what they have chosen that they learn how utterly un-choiceworthy it is.

This notion of a post-mortem "hell" that actually purges away impediments to salvation is, by the way, not original with the New Testament authors, let alone with Gregory of Nyssa and Origen and others like them who read the New Testament in universalist terms. The Zoroastrians, who strongly influenced the Jewish community out of which Christianity was born, held that the damned were seduced by a lie and thereby fell into the clutches of Ahriman (the Zoroastrian Devil). But once in Ahriman's grasp, the lie was exposed--by the Devil's own gloating! And so the Devil himself sowed the seeds of the damned's eventual salvation.

On Vacation

While I have occasional access to a computer and may offer some posts over the next couple of weeks (and have opportunities to address comments), I can't make any promises about frequency. But I do have several posts in the pipeline on interesting topics, so keep checking in.

Mangling Me at The Jesus Creed...

Not literally...but Scot McKnight has another piece on universalism over at The Jesus Creed this week--this one about my argument that appears in Universal Salvation? The Current Debate (edited by Robin Parry and Christopher Partridge). Unfortunately, McKnight misconstrues my arguments there in a significant way--perhaps influenced subconsciously by his desire to push the challenge he posed in relation to his earlier article on "Thomas Talbott's Gauntlet". His challenge, in effect, is this: What scriptural basis is there for thinking God would afford the unregenerate an ongoing opportunity to repent and seek salvation after death?

In effect, McKnight wants to argue that I am making a case for universalism that rests on the assumption that God would do exactly this. But that is not what I am doing in the essay. Rather, I am investigating the coherence of a particular approach to defending the doctrine of eternal damnation--an approach that appeals to the freedom of the creature, and to the idea that God's moral character inspires Him to respect that freedom, even if it leads to damnation. And freedom alone would inspire damnation only if it were possible for the creature to choose freely to remain forever alienated from God.

Freedom would explain eternal damnation only if a creature could either (a) freely choose to be alienated forever, or (b) forever freely choose to be alienated. Doing (a) involves making, at some point, a final and decisive choice for alienation. That is, the person decides at some particular moment, "I choose to be alienated from God FOREVER." Doing (b) involves, at every moment ad infinitum, making the choice to be alienated from God at that moment.

In my essay in the Universal Salvation? anthology, I don't devote much attention to the distinction between (a) and (b). On reflection, this may be a defect of that essay. But for various reasons--some of which can be extracted from the arguments I do lay out in that essay, I think (a) makes little sense. Whether I can freely choose at some moment to make a permanent commitment depends not merely on me at that moment, but on other things as well. If what I am presented with is a "limited time offer," then it clearly is true that the choice to reject the offer, if unreversed by the time the offer runs out, becomes a choice to forever reject the offer. If, by contrast, what I am presented with is a standing offer--one that just isn't ever revoked--then I can't really choose to forever reject the offer unless I follow course (b). While I might say to myself at some given time, "I reject this offer FOREVER," I remain free to change my mind precisely because the offer is a standing offer. So I can't really CHOOSE at some particular time to forever reject the offer when the offer has the form of a standing offer--because I remain forever free to change my mind given the nature of the offer, that is, given something outside my control (something that is, instead, a matter of the choices made by the one who extends the offer).

If--as liberal defenders of the doctrine of hell assume--we suppose that there is nothing in God that operates as an impediment to salvation, but that eternal damnation is wholly explained by the free choices of the creature, then we must, I think, take it that God's offer of salvation is a standing offer. If it is a limited-time offer, then at some point God withdraws the offer such that even if an unregenerate person later freely repents and earnestly seeks salvation, God withholds it. Here, it is not just the freedom of the creature that explains eternal damnation, but some active steps on the part of God. It is not merely the creature who rejects God, but God who, in effect, rejects the creature (at leat after the limited-time offer of salvation has expired).

So, the liberal doctrine of hell must suppose that the damned are those who follow course (b)--they forever reject God. My question in the essay that McKnight discusses is whether this is possible. My answer is that it is not. (John and I, in God's Final Victory, develop these arguments far more rigorously, but only after we tear apart the arguments which suppose that a God anything like the God of orthodox Christianity would ever decisively reject creatures). In any event, my conclusion in that essay is that the liberal doctrine of hell doesn't work. And this negative project does not depend on me illegitimately presupposing, without scriptural warrant, that God never withdraws His offer of salvation. Rather, I am simply asking whether, on the assumption that God never withdraws this offer (an assumption made by those who support the liberal doctrine), one can coherently defend the view that some are eternally damned by their own free choices. My answer is no.

My defense of this answer turns on some principles about the conditions under which a choice can be legitimately called free. McKnight takes these principles to identify the conditions under which God can be justified in damning someone--that is, conditions under which God can justifiably reject creatures forever. But in making this move, McKnight is considering a very different approach to justifying eternal hell--not the one I am considering in the Universal Salvation? essay. And in asking whether there is a scriptural basis for thinking creatures might freely turn to God after death and so be saved, McKnight is not merely asking whether there is any scriptural basis for the assumption that some universalists rely on to make their case for the salvation of all. He is also asking whether there is a scriptural basis for the assumption made by those who embrace the liberal doctrine of hell.

Now, with respect to this question that so concerns McKnight, I would argue that he is illegitimately restricting the scope of what counts as a "scriptural basis." My view is that, given a fairly orthodox understanding of God's character as developed by the Christian tradition through its earnest engagement with Scripture, we have prima facie (fancy philosophy talk for "presumptively") good reason to suppose God would never decisively reject His creatures. And from this it seems to follow that if a creature turned to God after death, they would be welcomed into the bosom of God as surely as if that choice were made before death. And so, if I (and John Kronen, and others like us) are right about what Scripture teaches concerning God's nature and His attitude towards His creatures, there is a scriptural case for the view that salvation remains possible after death even if no isolated scriptural passage says this.

Are there any considerations that might overcome this prima facie scriptural case? Many have been offered. John and I consider the most important of them in our book and find all of them unconvincing.

(On a more amusing note, I offered a fairly brief--for me--correction of McKnight's misunderstanding of my argument in a comment on his post--and the discussion in the comments section continued as if I hadn't said anything. The very first comment after my correction offered an interpretation of what "Reitan" is presuming that might have been forgivable had I not already piped in, but...well, let's just say that I often get the sense that interpreters of dead scholars are often grateful that those scholars aren't around, and would ignore them if they were.)

Talbott Endorses GOD'S FINAL VICTORY

Speaking of Thomas Talbott in conjunction with John's and my new book, Talbott has just provided the following endorsement (actually a mini-book-review) of God's Final Victory:

In their comparative case for Christian universalism entitled God’s Final Victory, John Kronen and Eric Reitan display an exhaustive knowledge of the relevant philosophical and theological literature; and even though they make no claim of completeness for their study, they may in fact have produced the most complete discussion to date of the relevant philosophical and theological issues. No philosopher or theologian who in the future addresses the issue of universalism will be able to ignore the arguments of this book, and even many parishioners in the pew, however impatient they may be with finely drawn philosophical distinctions, will benefit greatly from specific chapters, such as Chapter 1: Introduction, Chapter 4: Universalism and the “Plain Sense” of Scripture, and Chapter 9: Final Concerns. The final chapter in particular will be of interest to the Christian community as a whole, because it includes an easy to digest summary of the overall argument and also addresses the issue of evangelism as well as other practical Christian concerns.


The book’s most important contribution to the contemporary discussion lies in a sustained and powerful critique of the so-called Argument from Freedom, the argument that, for all we know, God cannot save all sinners without violating their freedom in inappropriate ways. Kronen and Reitan demonstrate first how, given the traditional Christian understanding of his nature, God is in a position to confer efficacious grace on anyone, or on any combination of persons, without violating the rational autonomy of any individual (see Chapter 7). But they also have an additional surprise, albeit one that Reitan has articulated in previous papers, for those who insist that salvation requires an undetermined libertarian free choice that could have gone the other way. For as they also argue in Chapter 8 (successfully, in my opinion), the assumption that sinners retain their libertarian freedom indefinitely together with the Christian doctrine of the preservation of the saints yields the following result: We can be just as confident that God will eventually win over all sinners (and do so without causally determining their choices) as we can be that that a fair coin will land heads up at least once in a trillion tosses. One can hardly expect everyone to find such arguments as persuasive as I do; but even those who remain unpersuaded will at least find in them a formidable challenge to be met.

All I can say is...Woot! Also, if you check out the link to the book's Amazon page, you will notice that the hardcover price has been SLASHED to a mere $85.71!!!! That's $34.29 off the list price! WHAT A DEAL!!!! Pre-order your copy now, before this deal disappears!

(Can't tell you the exact release date yet, but it'll be sometime in the next few months, and there are no glitches in the production schedule that I know of--just turned in corrected page proofs yesterday afternoon and the index is coming along on schedule).

Scot McKnight on Talbott's Case for Universalism

Over at The Jesus Creed, Scot McKnight has offered a post, Thomas Talbott's Gauntlet, that's sparked an interesting discussion on universalism. Those interested in the topic might like to look it over (as a kind of appetizer for reading John's and my book on the subject, of course). I've posted my own rather lengthy comment (lengthy because I'm psychologically incapable of doing less). I'd reproduce it here, but then I'd also need to reproduce parts of McKnight's original post and subsequent comments to which I am responding. So, just click on over and check it out!

Were I a Solipsist...

...I'd say that 45 years ago today, the single most momentous event in the history of reality occured. Not being a solipsist, I'll settle for wishing myself a happy 45th birthday.

Once More, With Logistics

Since I am too busy right now with proof-reading and indexing work on the forthcoming book to produce another substantive post in my Kantian ethics series, I post here a follow up to my previous, more light-hearted post. This is something I wrote a few months after my second child was born. Enjoy!

In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner claims that an ideal story will have three central characters. Two is too few, because then there will be only one relationship to explore. But add a third character, and one has six relationships: the relationships of A to B, B to C, and A to C, of course; but also A’s relationship to the BC pair, B’s to the AC pair, and C’s to the AB pair. The relational dynamics made possible by a third character creates just the level of complexity needed for a good story. Add a fourth character, however, and things get TOO complex. You can do the math yourself, but in that case what you have are twenty-five relationships. Too much for any normal human being, lacking in divine powers, to handle.


This year our family welcomed its fourth character. Evan’s identical twin, Isabella, was born shortly after 6 PM on a pleasant Oklahoma spring day with nary a tornado in sight. There was, of course, the usual business of my wife enduring labor and delivery (only 22 hours of labor this time), me cutting the cord, Isabella exercising her lungs for the first time, both parents getting the chance to hold the new arrival, etc. But these events and activities, which seemed so significant when Evan was born, were put in their proper perspective this time around by the inescapable reality faced by every second-time parent: logistics.

While I did, of course, spend a certain amount of time actually in the hospital room with my wife, I have little or no memory of this special time of spousal bonding. What I remember, with great vividness, is executing the tenuously orchestrated Child Care Plan—a hastily assembled patchwork quilt of caretakers, each of whom could only watch Evan for a few hours, with each childcare transition being achieved by me dashing out of the hospital to ferry my son from one caretaker to another. This process continued until the arrival of Evan’s grandmother who had to drive in from out of town.

I must say, at this point, that I have a bit of resentment about all of this. I mean, why wasn’t my wife doing her share of ferrying? Here I am, driving all over the city like a madman, while she kicks back in bed with a bevy of nurses waiting on her hand and foot.

I know, I know…she’s supposedly the one who is enduring all these labor pangs and all of that. And that argument clearly had some heft during her last pregnancy, when she put off getting the epidural until she was wracked with Pitocin-induced unquenchable agony of the sort that conservative Christians claim will be endured for all eternity by gays, atheists, and philosophy professors. But this time she had the epidural safely embedded in her spine long before I could detect any traces of suffering.

Okay…admittedly, it would be difficult to drive a car with an epidural embedded in your spine. But at least she could have offered.

It was in the midst of my final harried sojourn to bring Evan to his waiting grandmother that I received The Phone Call on my cell:

“Hi.” Pause. “Eric?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“In our driveway.”

“Umm. Don’t get into an accident or anything getting here but, well, I need you.”

“Need me?”

“It’s time.”

“Oh.”

I should point out that, depending on the route one takes, there are between seven and twelve traffic lights separating our driveway from the Stillwater Medical Center. I am convinced that each of these traffic lights has attached to it a device that I will call, for convenience, a Frenzy Detector.

The Frenzy Detector operates in the following way. Much as a lie detector recognizes the physiological cues that accompany dishonesty, the Frenzy Detector identifies the telltale signs of desperate-urgency-to-get-from-point-A-to-point-B-as-quickly-as-humanly-possible. Of course, whereas the lie detector is actually physically wired to the subject, and is thus able to respond to even the most subtle cues, the Frenzy Detector must read its subjects from a distance. Thus, it is triggered only by the most extreme heights of frenzy.

And when it is triggered, it responds by immediately turning the traffic light red.

As this continues to happen to the Frenzied Subject, the degree of frenzy increases exponentially, expressing itself in colorful language that (censored for the younger reader) amounts to something like the following: “Turn green! Darn you to tarnation! Green!! GREEN!!!! *@#!&^%!!!!!!” This is accompanied by the Frenzied Subject’s face turning a deep shade of purple.

And, of course, as soon as the Frenzy Detector senses the appropriate shade of purple, it responds by communicating to the traffic light the instruction to remain red for seven to twelve times the ordinary duration. Finally, the Frenzy Detector communicates to all the other traffic signals in the town, triggering a pattern of light changes designed to maximize traffic congestion along the route chosen by the Frenzied Subject.

Fortunately, epidurals make it possible for pregnant women to resist the urge to push until such a time as wayward husbands and otherwise preoccupied obstetricians can make it to the hospital room. Thus, I was present for the joyous moment when, with an ease reminiscent of one of the opening sketches of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Isabella slipped into the world.

Since that time, I have learned several new things about parenthood, including the following:


1) The strategy of parents staggering their sleep schedules in order to accommodate a new baby’s erratic sleep habits doesn’t work when there’s a three-year-old in the mix. Especially when that three-year-old wakes up every morning at 6 AM like clockwork, dances into his parent’s bedroom, pulls himself up onto the bed using fistfuls of comforter (landing in a sprawl atop Daddy), and then announces that he is hungry. The child, of course, is wonderfully well-rested and eager to start his day, having blissfully slept through the infant’s relentless screaming, which persisted through most of the night until the aforementioned infant finally fell into exhausted sleep at 5:49.

In fact, if there is anything I feel the need to express to other parents who are expecting a second child, it is this: Remember that delicious respite in the middle of the day, when the child would nap and you could finally sit down in the sofa with a cup of tea or a fifith of gin? This will become the time period during which you will be cleaning the baby’s explosive diarrhea off the changing table and nearby walls.


2) My wife put the second lesson succinctly, as follows: “I’ve spent three years diligently struggling to keep my son from killing himself. Now I have to keep him from killing himself and from killing Isabella.”

Let me be clear. Evan adores his little sister. In fact, Isabella is his very favorite toy. There is very little evidence of jealousy or sibling rivalry (although Evan has taken to walking around the house saying, “I’m a baby! I can’t walk! I’m a baby!”). Just the other day, while I was trying to put on Evan’s clothes, Evan was hanging on the edge of Isabella’s Exersaucer mashing his face up against hers (smearing her cheek with liberal amounts of snot, since he had a cold) while singing “I love you soooo much” to the tune of Für Elise. Clearly, this is love.

Unfortunately, he’s a three-year-old boy, and one of his favorite ways to show his enthusiastic affection for his stuffed animals is to pound them repeatedly on the top of the head with his fist. And then there’s the simple matter of three-year-old curiosity, which expresses itself in two ways: remorselessly asking “Why?”, and conducting scientifically imprecise experiments.

His favorite experimental subject is Isabella. You can almost see his intellectual wheels turning as he squats next to Isabella’s bouncer, studying her face while clenching and unclenching his little fists: I wonder what will happen if I put both fingers up her nose at once and then yank them sharply in opposite directions? Oh. Relentless screaming. Interesting.


3) Older siblings closely observe parental behavior towards younger siblings, and if a parent isn’t sufficiently careful, he or she can give away important parental secrets. For example, I used to remove Evan’s nose on a fairly regular basis. I would brandish it in front of him (a little pink bulb sticking out between my fingers) and ask him what I should do with it. Invariably, he would enthusiastically shout, “Eat it!” This would prompt me to pop it into my mouth, swallow it, and then pull it out of my ear and reattach it to Evan’s face.

But when I performed the same trick on Isabella, I saw Evan look back and forth between her face and the little pink blob sticking out of my fist, and I knew the game was up. Yesterday morning, when I snatched off his nose, he looked at me seriously and said, “That’s not my nose. That’s your thumb.”

“It’s your nose!” I insisted.

“My nose is battached. It doesn’t come off.”

“It doesn’t? Then what’s this in my hand?”

“Your thumb!” (He then proceeded to pry apart my fingers to show me that it was, in truth, my thumb.)

“Hmm. Well maybe I should take off Isabella’s nose instead.”

“You can’t. It’s battached too.”

“It is? How do you know?”

“Because God made her that way.”

And, of course, it’s impossible to argue with God.


4) No two children are alike. They may look alike (baby pictures of Isabella and Evan are virtually indistinguishable), but in the ways that count they are different from the very start. And this means that the swaggering confidence with which experienced parents approach the raising of their second child is, well, misplaced. For example, Evan was a screamer, and so Ty and I became used to conducting our adult dinner conversations to a soundtrack of relentless infant outrage. We learned to tune it out.

Isabella, however, is a comparatively happy child—which means that she only screams when she is hungry, or tired, or wants to be held (most of the time), or needs a diaper change, or has an odd rumble in her tummy, or has just had her left pinky bitten off by her big brother during one of his many experiments. She has this irresistible gummy smile and a halo of wispy baby hair, and mostly what we hear from her are vocalizations such as “Dagadaaweiwaa-wuwaaraooooooragadaga.”

Now, one would think that this would make life easier for us. If we’ve mastered a colicky baby, then surely we can handle a happy one. But here you would be…well, okay, admittedly this hasn’t proved to be such a problem.

But consider the following related issue. Evan did not nap until he was well past a year old. From before dawn until well after normal human beings have fallen into exhausted sleep, he would be busy (trying to overturn his bouncer or disassemble his Exersaucer or, when he was a little older but still too young to crawl, rolling across the floor in a committed attempt to reach and seize the dog). Isabella, by contrast, spent a good deal of time during her first months of life actually sleeping. This was, for us, a source of endless worry. “She’s so…listless,” my wife would say. “Do you think she’s sick?”

“Call the doctor.”

My wife dialed the doctor’s number and began talking to the nurse. “Yes. She’s sleeping all the time…Yeah… Oh, maybe twelve hours a day. Sometimes even more…She wakes up, eats, looks around, and goes to sleep again…Uhuh…No, no. No fever… mhmm… okay. Okay, thanks. Bye.”

She turned to me. “Apparently she’s a normal baby.”


5) One thing that I have learned from Evan’s meteoric development is to savor each stage in a child’s life, and not be in too much of a hurry to move on to the next stage.

For example, one of the things I remember with great fondness from Evan’s babyhood is that brief period of time, after Evan learned to sit up but before he learned to crawl, when you could plunk him down on the rug with a toy and then go mix martinis. When you came back into the living room, breathing in the sweet scent of Bombay Sapphire gin, he would still be sitting where you left him, his face purple from screaming but otherwise in good shape (unless he decided to start rolling in your absence, in which case he would be wedged into the narrow gap between the bottom of our futon and the floor).

I say that I remember this brief period with fondness, but at the time I didn’t properly appreciate tit. I saw in his eyes his eagerness to move, to really move, and his eagerness and concomitant frustration were infectious. I cheered him on as he tried to push himself onto all fours, even helping him along as he made his first efforts at crawling. I would, for example, stretch out my leg behind him so that he could use it to push off (since in the absence of such help his initial efforts at crawling led to his moving backwards). I thought (rightly) that the experience of success would encourage his efforts, leading him to master the skill more quickly.

I was, of course, a fool. As any parent will tell you, actual mobility on the part of your child is the first step towards the end of life as you know it. Now I am wiser. Isabella started sitting up a few weeks back. Often, she will be sitting there with a toy and it will roll just out of reach. This will inspire her to lean forward towards it, a determined expression on her little face. She will make a little noise of effort in the back of her throat, something like “Ooooorrraaaaaaghawawawawaga.” And as she leans towards the toy, she will end up propped up on her hands, her legs almost in the proper position for crawling. And then she will inch herself forward with her hands until she plops down on her tummy, just in reach of the elusive toy.

All of this, I know now, is a very bad sign. When this sort of thing was going on with Evan, I would actually sit back and watch, thinking that his efforts to reclaim the toy for himself would inspire him to master the use of his own body. Now, of course, I jump up out of the sofa and skootch the toy back into her reach. “NO crawling!” I will say, waggling my finger at her. “Sitting is gooooooood.” She will respond by smiling up at me happily, and then shoving the toy into her mouth.

Despite these efforts, all the signs indicate that she will be crawling sooner than her brother. I blame the infant/toddler room at her preschool, where she has far too many crawling role models. And so I must savor the moment as best I can. Sadly, since I am on antibiotics, I can’t savor it by mixing martinis.


6) Twice the number of children means twice the worry. This fall, we took Evan to the allergy specialist in Tulsa, who took his history and then order several tests. One of these was a sweat test (for cystic fibrosis). When we got home that evening, Ty began researching cystic fibrosis on the internet. That night, I watched her slip into Evan’s room and lean over his sleeping form in a tender maternal gesture that could only make me smile—until she came in to inform my that she had just licked our son. “It says that children with cystic fibrosis taste salty.”

“Did he taste salty?”

“Not really.”

“Okay, then.”

She proceeded to lick Isabella. “She tastes salty.” All the color left my wife’s face. “Omigod, Eric. What if both of our children have it?”

“They don’t. Evan’s an active…very active…little boy. He just coughs a lot because he’s inherited my asthma.”

“And he gets colds all the time.”

“So do I.”

The next day, her research uncovered a common symptom of cystic fibrosis: pale poop. “Eric, Evan has pale poop. He always has.” (At this point I should jump ahead to the conclusion, just to reassure my readers: Evan’s sweat test was decisively negative). Further research uncovered cases of adults who had mild cases of cystic fibrosis all their lives and never knew it. “Eric. You were tested for it, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But some tests are borderline. Was you test borderline?”

“I have no idea.”

During all of this, Isabella contracted a cold, and began coughing and snorting remorselessly. By this time, Ty was confronting the grim certainty that both of our children had this dread disease and were destined to struggle all their lives only to die young.

“It says that one of the signs of cystic fibrosis is wrinkling up quickly in the bath. Oh, Eric, I always thought it was so cute when Evan’s fingers would get all wrinkly in the bath and he’d hold up his fingers and tell me his finger were winkawy. I had no idea.”

“Tanya, my fingers wrinkle quickly in the bath.”

And so we conducted an experiment, actually a kind of race. The next time Evan was in the bath, I stuck my hand in the tub and held it underwater. Every few minutes we would check his fingertips and mine to see who would wrinkle up first. I won.

This was reassuring, but not decisive. “Maybe you have a mild case, and they just never figured it out. It would explain all your sinus problems.”

“Well, I’m still alive and kicking at forty, so if he’s inherited a mild case maybe that’s not such a tragic thing after all.”

And all this time, Isabella was still fighting a persistent cold, hacking her way through the night. I could see the way that Ty would study her beautiful little face, the way every cough would send through my wife a wave of dread and anticipated grief.

And the worry, the anxiety, was infectious.

All is well, of course. My kids have inherited their daddy’s respiratory tract, but no dread disease. Isabella is growing well, with just the right amount of baby plumpness. Evan is a dervish of activity. Life in our home is never dull, and sleep has become a precious resource. Our worries, our fears, and our hopes for our children all spring from a love that's hard to describe, which has little to do with the ways that they make us feel (which is mostly harried and exhausted) and everything to do with who and what they are: precious others, little human beings who are vitally engaged with their world, who are learning and growing and becoming.

They are a testament to possibility, to humanity; and the role that has been entrusted to us—the role of being their parents, the caretakers of the promise that they represent—is a sacred duty and a privilege. I can think of no other task that can do as much to teach the heart what it means to be human. My children are my teachers, even as I strive as best I can to teach them what I know about living well and being good.

Perhaps, in the end, this is what parenthood is about: learning from the loving struggle with our children what it means to live a good human life, and then finding ways to communicate that back to them in words and deeds.

Top Ten Horrors of New Parenthood

My wife's cousin and his wife are now the proud parents of a truly beautiful baby girl. Honestly, she really is lovely. I see pictures of newborns posted on facebook all the time--by preening parents and grandparents--and my usual thought is, "Another space alien." But this baby is, well, wow.

This beautiful new life reminded me of something I wrote not quite eight years ago, as my annual Halloween Greeting for 2003--which means I wrote it about six months after my first child was born. Since this is Claudia's first child, I thought it would be fitting as a way of honoring this important milestone to post here what I wrote back then. Also, with such a lovely child it may be easy to lose sight of the raw horror, anguish, trauma--and, well, grossness--that are in store. Thus I bring you...

The Top Ten Horrors of New Parenthood:

What follows is a list of the top (bottom?) ten horrors of new parenthood, each followed by an account of my own personal encounter with it. I should note up front that the ensuing list is necessarily incomplete. Having been a father for less than six months, I am certain that there are horrors I have yet to encounter (“Can I borrow the car?” tops the list for many of my friends with teenage children). Furthermore, since much of my early memory of fatherhood is blurred by Horror #5, it is quite possible that there are tribulations I have forgotten. Nevertheless, I have sought to be diligent in uncovering the seasonally appropriate spooky, creepy, and just plain disgusting dimensions of new parenthood.



Horror #1: Getting the Watermelon Through the Nostril

Little needs to be said here. When Tanya and I went to the hospital, there was talk of what is deceptively referred to as a “natural childbirth” (imagine fields of daisies and golden sunlight and a lovely pregnant woman in a pale linen dress skipping through the tall grass while sipping an organic yogurt drink). In fact, through approximately 22 of the 25 hours of her labor, there was still talk of such a thing. Apparently, until that point, the pain was only intense or, at worst, excruciating.

But then there came a point (the point at which drugs were administered to induce a stalled labor) when the word “pain” proved to be an inappropriate term for Tanya’s experience—in much the way that “unfortunate” is inappropriate to describe a meteor striking Earth and exterminating all life, or “banana” is inappropriate for the Bush administration’s current policies in Iraq. Apparently, the proper word at this point was not “pain” but, rather, “Epidural!” (hissed out between inarticulate screams).


Horror #2: Disturbingly Perky Ob/Gyn

When, like an angel of mercy, the anesthesiologist descended upon Tanya to plunge a magic needle into her spine, Tanya’s ob/gyn, whom we'll call Dr. G, was not far behind. Dr. G is articulate, competent, dedicated, and always up on the latest research. She has a talent for putting her patients at ease.

She is also perky. Imagine Meg Ryan as a physician and you wouldn’t be too far off. My wife adores her and professes to miss her now that she is no longer pregnant and hence can no longer regard Dr. G’s office as her second home. I don’t mean to contradict Tanya’s judgment here, but I saw what I saw in that delivery room.

Let me explain. The pushing phase of Tanya’s labor was the quickest and most satisfying of the whole 25 hour process (Tanya’s a good pusher). The first glimpse of Evan’s head—covered in dark hair—was amazing. And I must admit that, between bouts of pushing when the top of Evan’s hairy head was still visible, I was tempted myself. But Dr. G went beyond temptation. With a mischievous glint in her eye, she reached out and carefully coiled that tuft of hair into a perfect cowlick.

I suppose one might say that this was a lighthearted, even fey gesture, comic relief in the midst of an intense experience. One might even be tempted to say that it ushered in our parenthood with a reminder that one should always see the humorous side of things. One might say these things…but in the spirit of the season I am determined to find something sinister here. So bear with me while I grope…there must be something frightening about playful perkiness…ermm…well…moving on, then.


Horror #3: Schloppity-Schlop

When the baby finally slupped out (see Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax for a contextualized ostensive definition of “slupp”), he did not come out alone. He emerged with a great gush of fluids. And, of course, he trailed this pale blue rubber hose that I was given the opportunity to cut.

Let me say a word about this. My wife may have carried Evan in her body for nine months. She may have been in labor for twenty-five hours. She may have endured more intense pain than I will ever know and had crucial parts of her anatomy stretched and torn and temporarily relocated. All of this may be true. But it was I who cut the cord. So don’t let anyone ever say that I wasn’t involved.

Be that as it may, one of the grim realities of childbirth is that there is a great deal of blood, as well as gluppity-glupp and schloppity-schlop (again, see The Lorax) in various shades of pink and red. And I’m not just talking about the placenta, which Tanya and I studiously examined at Tanya’s request before it was ferreted off to whatever mysterious place placentas go.

You see, there is something they haven’t shown on the season finales of the four hundred and eighty seven TV series that have so far culminated their seasons with a childbirth episode. When all the pushing is over, when all the sweating and straining is done and the newborn baby is resting contentedly on the mother’s breast, someone comes in with a mop.

And in our particular case there was a further reason for distress: they missed a spot.


Horror #4: Worry

When Evan was first born, he decided to give his new parents a bit of a scare (displaying an early affinity for practical jokes). He grunted and wheezed while nurses suctioned his lungs and whacked his back with a device resembling a meat tenderizer. Still he could not seem to get the knack for breathing. While Dr. G was mending ("darning?") my wife with needle and thread on the other side of the room, I hovered over this wheezing little boy, straining to help him breath (to no noticeable effect). Finally the nurses decided they should call the pediatrician and order tests. As soon as this was done, Evan lapsed into comfortable, perfectly normal newborn breathing.

But this early display of vulnerability gave Evan’s new parents all the fuel they needed to construct elaborate reasons to worry and fret. Underdeveloped lungs? Some rare breathing disorder? The dreaded infant sleep apnea? Just in case anyone is wondering, it is not possible to both (a) sleep and (b) check every five minutes to ensure that the baby is still breathing. Fortunately, we came up with an alternative: one of those newfangled baby monitors that comes with a motion detector that is intended to put parent’s minds at ease by going off with a blaring noise every time twenty seconds go by with no noticeable movement.

In fact, the real function of the device is to put the living fear of God into the parents between two and seven times a night. Imagine two sleep deprived people (see horror #5) bursting out of bed, tripping over each other on the way to the crib, groping for the lights and the baby, all to the sound of a blaring alarm. All the fuss inevitably wakes the baby, who has been enjoying (of course) one of his rare moments of continued and restful sleep.

Obsessive attention to Evan’s breathing could not, of course, be separated from paranoia. A typical conversation:

“Hear that little whistling sound when he exhales?”
“That little snoring sound?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that normal?”
“What does the book say?”
(Leafing furiously through What to Expect in the First Year)
“Here it is. It says that a whistling sound is normal when the baby inhales.”
“But it’s when he exhales that he makes the noise.”
“I know.”
“Should we call the doctor?”
“What if it’s just, like, a cute little noise?”
“What if it’s a symptom of a rare respiratory disorder?”
“Call the doctor.”

Eventually this sort of thing culminated in men showing up at our door with Star Trek tricorders and other assorted medical equipment. The good news is that after a couple of days of having Evan connected by wires to medical recording equipment with alarm devices that went off every twenty minutes with a deafening blare (but, fortunately, only at night), the experts determined that Evan’s lungs were perfectly normal and that there was nothing to worry about. Of course, this did nothing to abate our worry. After all, it was even more frightening to imagine that Evan had a rare lung disorder that could not be detected using ordinary medical devices, and that now that the tests came back normal the medical professional would no longer believe us when we catastrophized…


Horror #5: Sleep Deprivation

Evan, having been born at 2:13 AM, thought initially that nighttime was the time to get active, make noise, be entertained, etc. Between his daytime feedings he would sleep soundly, but then he started waking up around midnight and would be fussy most of the night unless he was being rocked and held. When he was asleep during the day he was impossible to wake up. Thus, the pediatrician’s advice to “keep him awake during the day” proved to be a very nice theory. To be honest, I cannot recall the details. We would sometimes fall into exhausted sleep during the day, but it never quite did the trick.

On the third night home from the hospital—which meant on the sixth night without any real sleep (one night lost to labor, one to giving birth, one to sitting up all night in the hospital bed watching the weather reports about the tornado-producing storms sweeping through Oklahoma, and then three with a wide awake squirmy baby)—Tanya sat up in bed muttering something about the second baby.

“What?” I asked, groping my way out of a foggy half-sleep. “Where’s the second baby?” she asked again. The question made perfect sense to me. The second baby was not in the crib.

(Please note that we do not have twins. Evan is, so far, an only child.)

Of course, the sleep deprivation was far worse for Tanya, who in addition to being exhausted from childbirth was also the baby’s sole food source and hence had to be awake every 2-3 hours no matter what. Occasionally I would find her slumped over a feeding baby, snoring softly. Thankfully this problem endured for only the first few weeks, and by two-and-a-half months Evan was sleeping through the night (meaning from midnight to 4:30 AM). This is a good thing, since it helps us to more effectively confront horrors #6-9.


Horror #6: Pea Soup

21st Century diapers are a technological marvel, swiftly slurping up baby urine and converting it into a gel (subsequently recovered and, I think, turned into toothpaste) that is trapped between the inner and outer layers of material, thus ensuring that the baby and the baby’s clothes are kept perfectly dry. Unfortunately, this technology only works with urine. It does not work with pea soup.

We have become convinced that Evan suffers from an unusual deformity that directs the pea soup straight up the back rather than down into the diaper. And no matter how snug the diaper appears to be across the back, when the pea soup erupts with sufficient force it cannot be contained. When this occurs at home the cleanup process, while time consuming and somewhat smelly (although on rare occasions it actually smells kind of good), is relatively straightforward. Evan, however, prefers to blow out in church. We think that Evan idolizes Cher and wants his public appearances to be characterized by several wardrobe changes in a short period of time. This he guarantees by alternating between blow-outs and projectile vomiting (see horror #7).

The problem has gotten worse recently. Although he only produces pea soup once a day now, he produces just as much in a 24-hour period as he used to. The explosions can often be heard from several blocks away. His most remarkable blow-out occurred not at church but during our family outing to the zoo last month. Upon arriving at the zoo Tanya and I decided to take a quick trip to the restrooms, and Tanya took Evan in with her to change his diaper. I was soon to learn the horror that I had dodged by not being the one to take the baby. But I got a full report.

When I emerged from the men’s room I waited for Tanya and Evan. And waited.

And waited.

Fortunately the changing station was right by the restroom door. This meant that by surreptitiously (and without seeming the least bit creepy) stealing peeks into the women's restroom as others went in and out, I was able to assure myself that my family remained alive.

What I saw were glimpses of Tanya being slapped in the butt by the restroom door. But I could also see that she was working furiously, like a surgeon at the operating table. I knew, of course, that this meant a blow-out. I just had no idea how momentous a blow-out it was. I could see her moving back and forth between the diaper changing station and the trash.

I began to have a sense that something unusual was going on when, after five minutes, Tanya was still not done. After ten minutes, I realized that it was more than just unusual. After twenty minutes, I came to understand that Tanya was struggling valiantly to treat the effects of the diaper-blow-out equivalent of the Mount St. Helens eruption.

Twenty-five minutes later Tanya and Evan finally emerged from the restroom. And I heard the tale—a tale to inspire shock and awe in the heart of any parent. The good news is that the collar of Evan’s shirt had served as a kind of last line of defense in the face of the diaper’s utter failure to stay the tide. The pea soup had surged up against the collar and then rushed back down and out, pooling in his armpits. Of course, the effort to remove the soiled bodysuit from the happily squirming and laughing baby had ensured that any part of his body that had been spared the original explosion would not escaped untouched. Fortunately, there was a full complement of baby wipes in the diaper bag, so that a full body wash was possible. The (formerly) white bodysuit went in the trash.

I recall that the last time I was at the Oklahoma City Zoo I was rather disgusted by some of the antics of the gorillas. I can no longer remember why.


Horror #7: Projective Vomiting

I have often wondered what it must be like to reach the pinnacle of achievement in one’s youth, never again to rise so high or achieve so much again. In the past, when I had these thoughts, I was thinking of gold-medal-winning female gymnasts and prodigies in mathematics. Now, I can only look in wonder at what my own son has achieved in less than half a year of life.

His field: the art of projectile vomiting. Linda Blair, in The Exorcist, may have been a seminal figure in developing this art. But it is our son who has perfected it. He is—and I say this with all due humility—a master. In fact, I sincerely doubt that any will ever come to match him.

His most remarkable moment came in his pediatrician’s office. We were bringing him in with concerns about baby reflux (a deceptive name for a condition that pretty much guarantees that the addition of one baby to the household will multiply the frequency with which laundry is done by precisely 16.2 times). The pediatrician’s nurse cooed and oohed over him, delighting in how cute he was (and he is, I must say, very cute). That was before he soaked her, proving to everyone that he did, in fact, have baby reflux. Unfortunately, he was naked at the time, since he had just been weighed. While we were scurrying around trying to clean the “spit-up” from the floor and walls (rather than dutifully getting his diaper on him again with sufficient promptness), he set his Super Soaker 1000 to work for good measure. It was, at least from the perspective of the baby, a marvelous moment.


Horror #8: The Death-By-Not-Being-Held Syndrome

There are many tragic stories in the world. There are the great tragedies of the ancient Greek playwrights—Media, Antigone, Oedipus Rex—and, of course, Shakespeare’s masterpieces. But of all the tragedies that have ever been recorded, no tale is more devastating than the following tale: There are some moments during the day when, because of parental finitude, Evan is not being held.

One might not realize just how horrific this tragedy is until one hears the gut-wrenching sobs, moans of anguish, wails of despair, and glass-shattering screams that burst forth from Evan’s lungs in response to the experience of this woeful tale. Now there is good news here. Evan’s voice is clearly louder than that of any of the great Wagnerian opera singers alive today, and so we have high hopes that Evan has a grand career in musical theater awaiting him.

Since there is only so much that one can accomplish while holding the baby, it is inevitable that every once in awhile Evan’s parents need to set him down. We have a variety of surrogate baby-holders available for these moments: a bouncer, a baby swing, a Johnny Jump Up, and a “saucer” with a rotating seat that is surrounded by toys.

There is a story going around that babies are soothed by baby swings. Apparently, human genetics is such that every human baby finds comfort in the back-and-forth motion. If this is true, then we have the first piece of evidence that Evan represents a new stage in human evolution. Unless Evan is already fast asleep (in which case the rocking of the swing will keep him asleep for an extra three to four minutes), he finds absolutely no comfort in the swing. Nor is he entertained for long by the dozens of toys that surround him in the saucer (although, to be fair, I must add that this has gotten better over the last few weeks, ever since he’s been able to reach the toys). And although he has discovered how to jump in the Johnny Jump Up, this means that he can better express his outrage at not being held by jumping in fury as he screams.

When we leave the house, Evan is a smiling angel, delighting in all the sights and sounds of the world. He will sit happily in his car seat or stroller for hours. Eating out is never a problem: he’ll sit and watch us cheerfully as we eat, delighted to be out of the house and doing something. Also, when we have visitors he is entertained by the activity, the voices, and the new faces that hover over him and coo. What all of this means is that everyone in Stillwater is struck by what a good baby Evan is.

And he is a good baby. He is good at many things. Screaming, for example.

The fact that he can sit on his own when we are out of the house is our only real reassurance that Evan does not suffer from the dreaded death-by-not-being-held syndrome (see horror #4). We first came to fear that he might have this syndrome one day when, after taking turns carrying the baby for most of the afternoon, we set him in his saucer and he began to cry even before we had let go of his arms. Tanya said, “Come on, Evan. Sitting by yourself for five minutes won’t kill you.”

Even before the words were out of her mouth, we both had the same thought: What if it will? What if Evan suffers from some kind of rare disorder which causes no ill effects so long as he is in constant exposure to the combination of body heat, gentle pressure, and irregular movement that comes with being held? What if his screams when we set him down are exactly what they sound like? What if he is screaming for his very life? And here we are—me at the computer writing this, Tanya washing baby bottles—ignoring this death wail with a frustrated sigh and the dismissive thought that he’s got to learn to entertain himself without being held all the time…

For the sake of accuracy, I must add that he can be happy in his saucer for quite some time if one of his parents is kneeling next to him playing with him and, preferably, singing. I have found myself inventing new songs for his entertainment. For example: Evan has this little blue bear (a gift from his Bestefar—grandfather in English), and the other day I kept him delighted for a full twenty minutes by making the blue bear dance on the rim of his saucer while I sang a song with the following lyrics: “Blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue , blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue BEAR!!!”

Which leads us into horror #9…


Horror #9: A New Soundtrack

I am one of those people who constantly has a tune running through his head. Often I am whistling or humming the tune aloud, but even when that is not the case the tune is still playing and replaying at the back of my mind. A few years ago, Ravel’s Bolero ran through my head for a full three months. Prior to Evan’s arrival, I would usually find myself whistling some Puccini aria or something from the Rolling Stones. Now, it is the Winnie the Pooh song.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the song, the chorus runs as follows: “Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh, tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff. He’s Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh, silly-willie-nillie old bear.”

I did not know this six months ago. Now these words are hard-wired into my brain. The words and music run through my head when I go to bed at night and when I wake up in the morning. They set the rhythm of my lectures. They have become, in a word, the soundtrack of my life.


Horror #10: Babyhood is too short.

Evan’s baby phase is already half-gone, never to return. And despite horrors 1-9, the greatest horror of them all is that it all slips by so fast. His screams, of course, are matched by his laughter. His blow-outs and his projectile vomiting are soon forgotten when he falls asleep in your arms and nestles his head against your breast. When he reaches for your face with both his little hands, latching onto your beard or trapping your nose in his fist, the memory of sleeplessness slips away and all that is left is the memory of holding that tiny little warm bundle against you in the night and gazing down into that perfect face. And when he laughs in delight in response to the strains of Winnie the Pooh, the tune becomes more magical, more wonderful in its way, than anything that Bellini could produce. And yet he is already nearly twice the size he was at his birth, and soon he will be crawling around the house under his own power. The time will fly by, and I will regret every moment that I failed to savor, every second that I let frustration at his screams or his messy bodily fluids obscure the miracle of his life.

So there it is, for what it’s worth: the glories of fatherhood.

Huh?

Not sure if this is a general phenomen for anyone accessing my blog or just a localized issue for my computer, but this evening when I went to my blog I discovered that certain terms were highlighted and that when I moved my cursor over them a "Play Pickle" ad popped up. If others are experiencing this, it is not my doing--but if anyone knows how to get rid of it, let me know. I do not advertise on my site, and I certainly don't host free advertising.

Roger Sullivan on the Place of Moral Sentiments in Kant

My friend and co-author, John, just pointed me to some helpful passages from Roger Sullivan's Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory. These passages offer at least a partial response to the recurring challenge that, because Kant takes morality to be grounded in what reason demands apart from our inclinations, the portrait of the moral life that emerges is a coldly inhuman one--something fit for Vulcans, perhaps, but which calls us to subordinate all our desires and sentiments to this unfeeling duty.

The truth is more subtle than this. Kant does not take the moral life to be one in which emotions and sentiments of every sort have no place and are at best a distraction. Rather, he distinguishes between two species of feelings and desires: those that are "pathological" (by which he does not mean what modern psychologists mean by "pathological" but rather something more like "desires we just happen to have because of heredity and environment, because of our physical natures and the way that external forces interact with them"), and those that are moral. It is the former that Kant finds suspect. Here is what Sullivan says:

However similar they may be to merely pathological feelings and desires in other respects, moral sentiments are radically different in one critical respect: They do not have their origin in empirical sources outside our own reason so that we passively feel them. Rather, they are the subjective effect of our prior recognition of the objective and absolute binding force of the moral law. It is just because they are caused by reason alone that they can be moral feelings.

Kant makes the contrast between the two this way: our desires are merely pathological when we “represent something to ourselves as good, if and because we desire it,” whereas when we experience moral desires, “we desire something because we represent it to ourselves as good” on the basis of a prior judgment of the moral law inside us. Morality does not obligate us because we first find ourselves interested in it; rather, we find we are interested in doing our duty because we first recognize that it is our duty.

A foundational moral sentiment is reverence/respect for the moral law itself. And it is clear that Kant thinks such reverence or respect motivates us--and our acts have moral worth if and only if this is our motive. But this raises the natural question, "Isn't someone who obeys the moral law out of respect for the moral law really just following a hypothetical imperative, that is, an imperative that is contingent on the sentiments you happen to have?" In other words, isn't respect for the moral law just another "inclination" among others, so that whether you are motivated to act on the moral law is going to depend on what your inclinations happen to be? Here is how Sullivan addresses this issue:

The only incentive that can motivate us to adopt and act on the motive of duty, Kant writes, is the reverence or respect we feel for the moral law. This is not a feeling we need to try to “will” ourselves to have, for it arises irresistibly from our unavoidable recognition of the moral law. In fact, it is because we all inevitably experience respect for the moral law that we can be said to have a “predisposition” to be morally good. Moreover it is an incentive of such “herculean strength” that it enables us to offset the influence of all the “vice-breeding inclinations”. Because it follows from our recognition of the Law of Autonomy, it is the only motive that can give our actions genuine moral worth.

For us, then, respect for the moral law is the subjectively necessary side of our consciousness of duty. As an emotion, respect resembles fear in that we recognize that the moral law may rightfully demand the denial of self-love; it is also like love in that we recognize that this law originates in our own reason and is something we impose on ourselves. Finally, it is like nonmoral emotions in that it is a feeling that gives us an “impulse to activity” on which to act. But it is not just a feeling of attraction or of aversion, for it is not just a feeling like sympathy or empathy or love, all of which can be understood in naturalistic terms.

So important a role does respect have that, in his third “proposition” about the human good will in the Groundwork, Kant defines duty as “the necessity to act out of reverence for the law”. In his defense of human moral agency in the third chapter of that work, he again discusses moral interest, to try to ensure that his readers do not interpret their moral agency as pathologically caused. As we saw in the last section, moral sentiments must not be invoked as causal explanations for any part of our moral life. Regardless of how an empirical psychologist might interpret respect, from the moral point of view it represents a ground that is not explicable in naturalistic terms. Because acting from duty means acting out of reverence for the moral law, that law remains the ultimate objective motive of moral actions.

There are several questions we can ask about this: First, does Sullivan get Kant right? Second, if so, are moral sentiments as described here distinct enough from "pathological" inclinations to provide an answer to how morality, not inclination, can be said to be our motive when we act morally? Third, even if we separate out moral sentiments from inclinations and concede that it is only the latter which are irrelevant to moral life and at best a distraction, is that enough to free Kant from the original challenge that the moral life is in some sense coldly dehumanizing?

With respect to the last question, the following anecdote from Kant's life, related by Sullivan, may be worth reflecting on:

An incident occurred about a week before his death that has often been used to illustrate how Kant guided his relationships with others by the disinterested interest of moral respect, which he nonetheless called the “courtesy of the heart.”  Desperately weak, mentally unable to concentrate, and virtually blind, Kant insisted on rising and remaining standing until his doctor had seated himself.  With great effort Kant then remarked that at least “the sense of humanity has not yet a abandoned me”.