Monday

Jacobs

You don't hear much about Siger de Brabant these days. He's a Latin Averroist (fan of the Muslim philosopher, Averroes), who taught a lot of bizarre stuff, but in particular, he taught there were two types of truth: philosophic truths and religious truths. His framework was well-received at the University of Paris in the 13th century, but he was also a direct contemporary of St. Thomas Aquinas, who squashed all such tomfoolery, so after a brief flash of fame, his ideas died quickly.

I always think of him when I see a non-Christian arrive at Christian insights. It happens a lot in the sciences, and regular TDE readers know I frequently comment on them, normally with derision. If I see a headline like, "Studies show premarital sex hurts long-term marriage prospects," I think, "We shouldn't need a study to tell us that, but hey, I'm grateful they're catching on to Christian truths, no matter how slowly."

I use the Siger barometer to measure a liberal or non-Christian writer's good faith. If a writer with a non-Christian background comes to Christian truths, I really gravitate toward them.

And such has been my experience with A.J. Jacobs. NYC native, Jewish, Brown University alumnus, writes for Esquire. I gotta believe he leans left and doesn't have a lot of appreciation for Christian dogma, but it doesn't matter to me. He's funny, his prose is great, he does his homework, and--perhaps most important--he arrives at deep truths independently.

I honestly can't recall how many times I've seen this in his writing, but two come to mind. In The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, he writes about his efforts to follow the Old Testament teachings. Among those teachings, one finds the need to pray. So he starts to pray. After awhile, he realized that he really enjoyed praying and looked forward to it every day. It brought to my mind various observations from the spiritual masters. Most recently, Mother Theresa's lesson that, the more one prays, the more one wishes to pray.

And then this past weekend, I was reading from The Guinea Pig Diaries. He talks about how his experiment of giving presents to his wife actually increased his affection for her. He said, "It goes back to a recurring theme I've found in almost all my experiments: behavior shapes your thoughts."

Wow, it's almost as though he read C.S. Lewis' chapter, "Let's Pretend," in Mere Christianity. In that chapter, Lewis counsels Christians to act like Christ, even if they feel like phonies. Even if they just pretend to be Christ-like, they'll actually become more like Him.

Jacobs is 43-years-old. He's up-and-coming. I'm looking forward to seeing a lot more from him as the years go on.