Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is a paid subscription feature, with a preview for free subscribers. Please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.
Dear Friends,
First, a Public Service Announcement: Yesterday my chess hero Grandmaster Wesley So prevailed over classy 19-year-old Uzbek phenom Nodirbek Abdusattarov to advance to the Title Match of the Chess Champions Tour. It was a ferocious battle that took him countless games over the course of six hours and, once again faced with an Armageddon game to decide it all—and with an extra $50,000 on the line to secure at least 2nd place—Wesley again got the white pieces. And, once again, he prevailed! In his guileless style that people cannot cancel (you can’t really cancel a guy who plays chess at this level) he once again, of course, said afterward: “I want to thank Jesus Christ for today’s victory, because everything is by his will.”
I was also struck by an earlier interview in which he was asked about a particularly nervy time in a particular game. “Well, I’m a Christian, and everything is in God’s will. I just stay calm and play my best.” That can be written off as boilerplate, certainly (lots of athletes say that sort of thing) but the funny thing is that one thing about Wesley that everybody marvels at—and something that is so very important to chess in particular—is how incredibly calm he seems at every moment. I think his faith and trust in the Lord really does help him with the actual playing of chess. Losing is just not the end of the world, and so he is just not prone to panic.
He now faces Magnus Carlsen, the living legend, the greatest chess player of all time, and therefore the odds-on favorite, for the championship. Magnus won the first set of games today, and the action continues tomorrow at 12 EST when Wesley hopefully bounces back with a victory of his own. My two favorite players! You should peek in to check it out from time to time. You can find the livestream here.
You may have noticed in Wednesday’s Quarter Inch that I wasn’t very interested in writing about the current events on offer. I know that all my recent chess talk gives this impression, but I really am not an escapist. It is just that the Advent season is an elevated time to me, and I despair at the day-to-day grind of politics and culture war. I look at my Twitter feed and just want to yell at everybody: take a day off! Time out! I guess I am sort of taking a time out myself. But finding topics that interest both you and me this time of year can be challenging.
Let me rummage around my space a bit. I do have things that interest me; but will they interest you? I am reading Peter Leithart’s brand-new book, Creator, and probably will have a lot to say about his survey of ancient Greek metaphysics and the very unstable conceptual seams in Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of God. But it would take a lot of effort to make that interesting for you. It’s not the most scintillating of topics for Average Joe, is it? I mean, I would never recommend this book to Average Joe; unless he’s really familiar with schools of Greek philosophy, in which case he would no longer be average, the first half will be incomprehensible.
Let’s see. Also in my stack next to me is Abraham Kuyper’s Our Program, one of a thirteen-volume set of Kuyper’s collected works on public theology (a set recently gifted to me!). I’ve just started it and already it is so illuminating. I once wrote my belief that Kuyper’s political philosophy is practically indistinguishable from the classically liberal tradition of Edmund Burke; and what is this I see? On the first page of his “program” for his Anti-Revolutionary Party, Kuyper expresses his explicit alignment with Burke, and also the American founding. His description of the revolutionary ideology of progressivism rotting away the foundations of Christendom and of the western tradition is scathing, and prescient. Read this with present-day Critical Theory in mind:
As an idea, Revolution turns everything topsy-turvy, such that what was at the bottom rises to the top and what was at the very top now moves to the bottom. In this way it severs the ties that bind us to God and his Word, in order to subject both to human criticism. Once you undermine the family by replacing it with self-chosen (often sinful) relationships, once you embrace a whole new set of ideas, rearrange your notions of morality, allow your heart to follow a new direction—once you do this the Encyclopedists [read: academics] will be followed by the Jacobins, the theory by the practice, because ‘the new humanity’ requires a new world. What the philosophers, whose guilt is greater, did to your minds and hearts with pen and compass and scalpel (and would like even more boldly to do to your children) will be carried out by the heroes of the barricades with dagger, torch, and crowbar.
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