***

We spent our afternoon and early evening in a way that we don’t usually do on Sundays – or, for that matter, on any other day of the week. We witnessed the promotion of a friend, son of friends, from the rank of colonel in the US Army to the rank of brigadier general. The event also featured the change of command ceremony in which he assumed the position of Deputy Adjutant General of the Army for the Utah National Guard, a position which is being vacated due to retirement. of his predecessor. It was an impressive afternoon. The new general’s father, Arnold H. Green, was a professor of Middle Eastern history at the American University in Cairo when my wife and I arrived in Egypt to begin graduate studies in Arabic and Middle Eastern studies. . Elder Green was also president of the Cairo Branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He and his wife, Lani, have become dear lifelong friends. We have known Brigadier General Joseph W. Green—for us, “Joey”—since he was a little boy, playing on the floor of his parents’ house, where the branch used to meet. (Arnie Green later joined the faculty at Brigham Young University, where he eventually chaired the history department and served for several years as director of BYU’s Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies.)

I suspect General Green’s brief speech at the ceremony was more literary than most of these military speeches. It included a witty allusion to Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesara quote from Irish poet William Butler Yeats and another quote from “What I Have Learned So Far” from American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize:

Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime and the holy, and yet commit
to no work in his cause? I do not think so.

He also quoted the last line of this poem, so I think I’ll just give the whole poem here, so you can understand the context:

Meditation is ancient and honorable, so why should I
not sit down, every morning of my life, on the hill,
look in the brilliant world? Because, correctly
attended, pleasure, as well as havoc, is the suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime and the holy, and yet commit
to no work in his cause? I do not think so.

All summons have a beginning, every effect has a
history, all goodness begins with the seed sown.
The buds of thought towards brilliance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of — indolence, or action.

Get fired up or leave.

The only literary thing that surprised me about General Green’s remarks was the absence of any reference to Jane Austen. He’s a huge Austen fan – which certainly can’t be quite typical of a soldier who’s been deployed to both Afghanistan and Iraq and whose specialty is linguistics and intelligence (seriously , classified).

Then a few of us, old guys from the Middle East, former BYU colleagues from his father as well as veterans from the Cairo branch, got together with our wives and with members of his immediate and extended family at his mother’s house in Orem, to eat and chat. . But we missed his father Arnie, who died in 2019 and who would have been very, very proud of his son today. Joey and his wife both commented that they saw us, the Cairo contingent, as representing his father. I hope so. We were honored at the thought.

***

Three passages from a response to Richard Dawkins by the eminent British writer and Cambridge University scholar John Cornwellvolume editor such as Imagination of nature, explanationsand Consciousness and human identity and author of books such as Coleridge: A Critical Biography, Hitler’s Pope, Power to harm, Hitler’s scientistsand The Pope in Winter:

I want to write to you now about your utopia. You have issued a glowing promise of ultimate happiness, if only your readers will trust you. You want them to believe in a paradise that will be theirs when religion is finally wiped off the face of the earth. You sing them a version of the famous song “Imagine” by John Lennon.

“Imagine. . . a world without religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no crusades, no witch hunts. . . no Israeli-Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as “Christ killers”, no “Troubles” in Northern Ireland; . . . no Taliban to blow up ancient statues”.

Your list sounds pretty strong (although some of your examples may well be the result of age-old tensions), but it omits two catastrophic eras in recent history: Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. Should we worry that Stalinism and Nazism revealed the kind of world that emerges when religion nods not to just anything, but to science as ideology combined with militant atheism? . . .

Have you read the Table Talk Hitler’s ramblings about religion’s capitulation to science? Just listen to it! “The dogma of Christianity is worn out by the progress of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Little by little, the myths crumble. When the understanding of the universe became generalized. . . then the Christian doctrine will be convinced of absurdity. . . .

Religion does not necessarily lead to evil. Human wickedness, persecutions, massacres, torture, ethnic cleansing stem from a complexity of human motivations – fear, insecurity, idealism, paranoia – in a mixture of political, social, ideological, scientific and, yes, sometimes religious. Where religion emerges as a factor in conflict – take Ireland, or the Balkans, or the Arab-Israeli conflict – it may be only one marker of difference, in association with others, reinforcing a variety of tensions which in turn represent a larger field. antagonisms—geographical, historical, tribal. But I can see that accepting this point would not suit your thesis.

John Cornwell, Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Response to The illusion of God (London: Profile Books, 2007), 85-86, 88-89, 90-91.

Finally, a passage from the great and heroic Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

Just because the truth is too hard to see doesn’t mean we make mistakes. . . . We make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable path for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions, especially those that are selfish.