Half-response

Apparently my other one did finally go through, so I just took down the duplicate. Anyway, I wrote this up on March 1st, so I'm backdating this to then; I'm just posting it (in-progress) in case anything else happens to my computer. Turns out the crashed harddrive didn't destroy this (it did eat some other GS310 project files, but thankfully I was done with them, more or less...)

Elshtain, though of course arguing with her own style, is essentially in agreement with the likes of Richard Deem, Dallas Willard, and other Christian critics of our contemporary culture, and so also pushing in the same direction I attempted to in my paper. She is at odds with the hollow consumer-individualist scheme of our day right from the outset of her introduction (p. 4). Elshtain is hopeful, but not within a continuation on our present course; rather, hopeful in the possibility of changing course even in the bleakness of our plight, i.e., what I labelled "[o]ur terrible world," and what she began chapter one looking back from: "the end of this bloodiest of centuries" (p. 7).

Bonhoeffer's framing of freedom as a relationship (p. 15) is interestingly put and accurate, but, I would say, he is not talking about free will as such (neither is Elshtain when she fleshes it out later on p. 86) in the way that I did: In a strictly experiential sense, we appear to be able to make our own choices. Bonhoeffer is operating on a higher definition of freedom as something intrinsically good, and in that way, his statement, "No substantial or individualistic concept of freedom can conceive of freedom," actually fits well with what I wrote about the ludicrousness of being one's own god (defined as the object of one's devotion, or, in other words, the one to whom one gives one's freedom--but this giving is still apparently an individual act of free will, otherwise Bonhoeffer would not have bothered writing to try to change people's lives.)

He continues, and Elshtain picks out his contrasting picture of sexuality in the fallen world, which smacks remarkably of Rand's description of sex as a primal, almost hateful act of domination (as opposed to the mutual celebration suggested by Wojtyla's Genesis exegesis) in Atlas Shrugged, which coincides with Elshtain's later point about our culture normalizing sin. Although I did disagree with certain interpretations of Genesis throughout the rest of the chapter, none were too consequential; having said that, I tended to warm more to Wojtyla's interpretations, precisely because they were more hopeful.

Elshtain makes an interesting link that I neglected to emphasize. I outlined self-deification as a problem and economic systems, being things of utility, as non-solutions, but she probes their combined effects on our ethical constructions, such as undermining the intrinsic value of human life and inverting many of the saving graces yet sanctioned by society (p. 51).
Her chapter on sloth, which seems to have a Heideggerian ring to it insofar as sloth is something akin to falling prey, goes much deeper and beyond the scope of my essay, but I liked what she did with it nonetheless. Thereafter Elshtain also laments the monsters our self-deifying society seems poised to create, and the loss of integrity that has lead us and been circularly magnified by our following it to this point.

That's all for now. Off to discrete math class not-so-discretely for me.

Kev