From today’s YDN

Volf’s upbringing on the cultural margins helped him develop the ability to find points of convergence in conflicting viewpoints, making Volf the unconventional and creative scholar he is widely considered today, research assistant Neil Arner DIV ’07 said. With a professional portfolio that includes over 150 editorials and articles and 11 books, Volf has been called “one of the most celebrated theologians of our day” by Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams.

“I was a total outsider,” Volf said of his childhood during the 1960s in Communist-controlled Yugoslavia, where his father was a pastor.

As a religious person in Communist Yugoslavia as well as a practitioner of a marginal religion, Pentecostalism, within Croatia’s small religious community of Roman Catholics, Volf was actually an outsider twice over, Arner said.

Volf, now a member of the Episcopal Church, said he formally affirmed his Christian faith at the age of 16. From then on, Volf recalls being sent to the principal’s office multiple times during high school for wearing a cross or openly discussing his religious beliefs.

“For me, it was matter of personal religious faith,” Volf said, “but it was perceived by the totalitarian state as a subversive act.”

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Read the whole thing but come back to the pull quote. Miroslav is a serious Christian and a fine theologian. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him that while wearing the cross was “for [him] a matter of personal religious faith”, the totalitarian state’s perception is accurate that his doing so was “a subversive act.” But witting or not, the article gives the impression that for Miroslav the cross is a matter merely of personal religious faith and not subversive at all. That mistakes him and it mistakes the cross.

The cross has never been a personal objet d’ art. It was a capital punishment Rome reserved not for everyday brigands but for insurrectionists, thus it has always been associated with political subversion. It wasn’t Dali or Rubens who inspired the Roman governor Varius to execute two thousand men at once on separate crosses a few years before the angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night. The Roman general Titus wasn’t moved by Georgia O’Keefe or David Yurman to crucify 500 Jews daily outside the walls in plain view of the citizens of Jerusalem. The cross was to Rome a public service announcement. Six thousand men crucified every 130 feet on the Appian Way from Rome to ancient Capua advertises WHO’S IN CHARGE on a linear scale that even Madison Avenue couldn’t dream up. It is not for his aesthetics—his taste for clean lines—that the name Pilate has been on the lips of Christians every Sunday for nearly two millenia.

Ever since Rome crucified him people who’ve trusted Jesus with their lives have said JESUS IS LORD. They haven’t shut up about it even when the state persecuted and killed them for it. No one ever responds to the cross tout court.

Professor William A. Read, a distinguished linguist, put it this way in a journal of philology: “The pronunciation of educated Americans is in many respects more archaic than that of educated Englishmen.” This should be no surprise, he said, since “the phonetic basis of American pronunciation rests chiefly on the speech of Englishmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” And those Englishmen sounded much like the Americans of today. The “English accent” that we now associate with educated British speech is a relatively new phenomenon and didn’t develop until after the American Revolution.

Look at the way the letter r is pronounced (or not pronounced), perhaps the most important difference in the speech of educated people in the US and the UK. Since Anglo-Saxon days, the English had pronounced the r in words like “far,” “mother,” “world,” “church,” and “mourn.” English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic pronounced the r’s in these words when the Colonies broke away from England. Most Americans still do. But educated people in Britain began dropping their r’s in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Americans most likely to drop their r’s were those, like New Englanders, who had strong commercial and social ties with the mother country.

This dropping of r’s in Britain didn’t happen all of a sudden, and the sticklers of the day didn’t take it lying down. “The perception that the language was ‘losing a letter’ was a cause of profound upset to some writers,” the linguist David Crystal has written. The poet Keats, for example, was cruelly upbraided by critics for rhyming “thoughts” with “sorts,” and “thorns” with “fawns.” Lord Byron blamed a critical article for hastening Keats’s death in 1821: “‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.” But by the time Keats died, the dropped r was a standard feature of educated British pronunciation.

The other letter that’s a dead giveaway in telling a Brit from a Yank is the a in a word like “past.” We all know how an American would say it — with an a like the one in “cat.” And as anyone who’s watched Masterpiece Theatre can tell you, the standard British pronunciation is PAHST. But it wasn’t always so. The Brits used to say it the same way Americans do now. Here again, the Americans stuck with an old way of speaking, one the British abandoned about the same time they dropped their r’s.

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from Stiff Upper Lips by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman

Finally, we are required to do something that it seems rather odd to have to say. We have to re-discover some confidence and conviction in who we are, how far we’ve come and what we believe in. By the way, I think this even about the economic crisis. It is severe. It’s going to be really, really hard. But we will get through it and not by abandoning the market or open economic system but by learning our lessons and adjusting the system in a way that makes it better. But on any basis, this system has delivered amazing leaps forward in prosperity for our citizens and we shouldn’t, amongst the gloom, forget it.

The same is true for the security threat we face. We are standing up for what is right. The body of ideas that has given us this liberty, to speak and think as we wish, that allows us to vote in and vote out our rulers, that provides a rule of law on which we can rely, and a political space infinitely more transparent than anything that went before ; that body isn’t decaying. It is in the prime of life. It is the future. And though the extremists that confront us have their new adherents, we have ours too, nations democratic for the first time, people tasting freedom and liking it.

And that is why we should not revert to the foreign policy of years gone by, of the world weary, the supposedly sensible practitioners of caution and expediency, who think they see the world for what it is, without the illusions of the idealist who sees what it could be.

We should remember what such expediency led us to, what such caution produced. Here is where I remain adamantly in the same spot, metaphorically as well as actually, of ten years ago, that evening in this city. The statesmanship that went before regarded politics as a Bismarck or Machiavelli regarded it. It’s all a power play; a matter, not of right or wrong, but of who’s on our side, and our side defined by our interests, not our values. The notion of humanitarian intervention was the meddling of the unwise, untutored and inexperienced.

But was it practical to let Pakistan develop as it did in the last thirty years, without asking what effect the madrassas would have on a generation educated in them? Or wise to employ the Taliban to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan? Or to ask Saddam to halt Iran? Was it really experienced statesmanship that let thousands upon thousands die in Bosnia before we intervened or turned our face from the genocide of Rwanda?

Or to form alliances with any regime, however bad, because they solve ‘today’ without asking whether they will imperil ‘tomorrow’? This isn’t statesmanship. It is just politics practiced for the most comfort and the least disturbance in the present moment.

I never thought such politics very sensible or practical. I think it even less so now. We live in the era of interdependence; the idea that if we let a problem fester, it will be contained within its boundaries no longer applies. That is why leaving Africa to the ravages of famine, conflict and disease is not just immoral but immature in its political understanding. Their problems will become ours.

And this struggle we face now cannot be defeated by staying out; but by sticking in, abiding by our values not retreating from them.

It is a cause that must be defeated by a better cause. That cause is one of open, tolerant, outward-looking societies in which people respect diversity and difference in which peaceful co-existence can flourish. It is a cause that has to be fought for; with hearts and minds as well as arms, of course. But fought for, nonetheless with the courage to see it through and the confidence that the cause is just, right and the only way the future of our world can work.

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You can read the whole speech at tonyblairoffice.org

Thus far, love them or hate them, U2 have been unassailable. No other rock band has lasted longer, nor made such consistently good, and often challenging, rock music, nor staged such epic and technologically cutting edge shows.

What is most intriguing - and, to their detractors, infuriating - about U2 is that they succeeded by ignoring, indeed breaking, most of the unwritten rules of rock stardom. They didn’t - with the exception of the pre-rehab Adam Clayton - do sex or drugs and, as their critics pointed out, neither did they really do rock’n’roll. They were not rebellious, nor angst-ridden, nor did they trade on adolescent alienation or anger. Instead, they did joy. And spiritual joy, to boot. This made them unfashionable in Britain, the irony capital of the world, where sincerity, especially sincerity tinged with spirituality, is seen, at best, as uncool, at worst as downright embarrassing.

“One of the reason’s for U2’s longevity,” says Brian Eno, “is that they are not in music for entirely selfish reasons. I don’t want to make them appear as evangelists, which, of course, they were seen as by some sections of the music media in the early 80s, but I do believe that they really think that what they do serves some greater purpose than simply filling their bank accounts.”

Initially, I had little time for U2, their songs, their haircuts, their Christianity. My epiphany occurred when I was sent to Rome by the NME in the summer of 1987 to interview Bono after the first gig of their European tour - The Joshua Tree tour. Put simply, it was a revelation: a rock group whose music made sense in a stadium, whose songs retained - and inspired - a kind of communal intimacy in a crowd of 60,000 people. And, boy, did Bono work that crowd. He was one part rock star, one part showbiz trouper, one part preacher man. In America, where cool is not such a reductive currency, U2 were embraced with open arms. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Sean O’Hagan in the Guardian