explanations

I read and enjoyed this review of Why?, by Charles Tilly... during Theological Reflection. I couldn't formulate a coherent post last night, and my mind is too gooey now to write an interesting and accurate synopsis of the review, but you should check it out if you ever spend significant amounts of time wondering why two people (or groups of people) can't understand one another.

In short, though, the review (and probably Tilly as well) argues for four different categories of reason-giving: conventions, stories, codes (high level conventions), and technical accounts (high level stories).

The reviewer, Malcolm Gladwell, gives an example of a small boy named Timothy who wants to tell his mother a story about his brother, and hears in return a convention: Don't be a tattletale. The story form of reason-giving was truthful, for the boy, but inappropriate with regard to the power differences between himself and his mother. His father can tell his mother stories about his brother's poor behavior, but the boy cannot. Gladwell writes,

The fact that Timothy's mother accepts tattling from his father but rejects it from Timothy is not evidence of capriciousness; it just means that a husband's relationship to his wife gives him access to a reasongiving category that a son's role does not. The lesson "Don't be a tattletale," which may well be one of the hardest childhood lessons to learn, is that in the adult world it is sometimes more important to be appropriate than it is to be truthful.

I'm excited about sermonizing on the dark underbelly of grace, but now I'm tempted to change my topic to Tattletaling Prophets.

In addition, you should read this article on vodka, which I also got from Arts & Letters Daily.

How can we stop drinking with a climate like ours?

Good question, Russians.