My young relative is a forester and I think he would agree with me that there's some perversity in treating tree planting as akin to natural processes in a way that agriculture is not. In fact the only real difference is temporal.
I am being stimulated by Hannah Arendt on work at the moment and she's really interesting on fabrication - the process of creating the human world with work. The problem as she identifies it is that this turns everything into a means-ends continuum: you cut the tree down to make the table which you need to have the meeting which you need to run the organisation.. and so on. There is no "end" because each end is defined as a means for something else and the intrinsic value of every thing is lost.
In another sense it is a triumph of accounting and economics in that one knows the worth of everything and the value of nothing.
So going back to trees, we have the paradoxical situation of having permanently changed the atmosphere with the work (in Hannah A's distinction) of burning fossil fuels to power the fabrication of the human artifact, but we can only understand the remedial effects of what we might do to rebalance things in terms of their utility. Trees become theoretical units of carbon and their processes in the human conception become inefficient/efficient ways to store carbon depending on what the question is that is being asked and by whom. There's a form of violence in all these activities, which we justify as means to an end even though the end is never really achieved, largely because we have lost the vision of whatever it was that we were trying to do under a (metaphorical) pile of paperwork and blueprints of clever new inventions.
Other people, nature and everything else become pawns in some greater narrative. It's "not great" that this woman hurt herself, but won't someone please think of the real victims in this event, me and mine. We are the soldiers fighting for the noble cause, these other things are unfortunate collateral damage.
It is being done, especially where farmland has become marginal. Old abandoned farms are being restored to prairie. You can plant a prairie by preparing the site thoroughly, choosing the right native species for your soil and sun, and managing weeds aggressively during the first 2–3 years.
Just last night we watched a program on Washington Agriculture were owners of an overused, depleted farm were restoring the land to prairie. It can be done.
It is being done, especially where farmland has become marginal. Old abandoned farms are being restored to prairie. You can plant a prairie by preparing the site thoroughly, choosing the right native species for your soil and sun, and managing weeds aggressively during the first 2–3 years.
Just last night we watched a program on Washington Agriculture were owners of an overused, depleted farm were restoring the land to prairie. It can be done.
Good stuff. There's a patch out here on the lakefront that's nice. But it takes some work.
Interesting as trees and prairies are, this thread is about divine self-pardon. If anyone wants to discuss the merits and demerits of tree-planting, please start a new thread.
I guess... some sort of penance would have been specified by his confessor?
That depends on the church and how confession is approached, or even if it involves an ordained priest at all.
As noted upthread, Gonzales is Catholic.
Indeed. So I assume he means sacramental confession.
Yes that's exactly what I meant. Wouldn't such a confession of a grave sin like this usually involve the imposition of a pretty severe penance alongside the granting of absolution?
There is an interesting story in the records of a neighbouring church. In 1791, William, an Episcopalian, approached his local Church of Scotland and asked to be summonsed for discipline. They refused as he wasn't a member of their congregation. He then made a pest of himself, approaching the minister and various elders individually. Eventually they caved, and summonsed him, at which point he told them that he had committed adultery with a neighbour, Margaret, a widow, who had fallen pregnant, although he wasn't sure whether he was the father of the child.
The church agreed he could undergo public repentance. One elder suggested they could benefit from the situation by also fining him, but the other elders said that the impact of any fine would be felt more by his wife and children than him, and they did not fine him.
He did two Sundays in the Place of Repentance. Generally a member of the congregation would do at least three Sundays for adultery, but they seemed mindful that he wasn't a member of the congregation.
I don't know why he felt the need to be publicly disciplined by a church he did not attend. Possibly he was tormented by guilt? Possibly his neighbours were Presbyterian and he felt under pressure? I don't know what form any censure from his own church would have taken, but presumably it would have been less public.
There is a tragic backstory:
Margaret had travelled into Aberdeen to conceal the pregnancy, and had killed the baby. She was imprisoned. It would be understandable if William was wracked with guilt.
I could guess. Maybe he felt too ashamed to be up front with his own congregation. Maybe the spiritual style of his own church didn't allow for public expressions of repentance because Calvinism tends to say you're chosen or you're not. Max Weber comes to mind. My own migration started with gentle PCUSA Presbyterianism and wound up in progressive Episcopalianism; I can sometimes feel the shift in the way people approach liturgy and practice even today.
Christian is Christian. Church-shopping like that feels pretty natural to a 21st century American, but at the time I suppose that would have been a more dramatic thing to do. And if he's not a total narcissist, I can't imagine him not feeling some kind of guilt about the whole affair.
Maybe the spiritual style of his own church didn't allow for public expressions of repentance because Calvinism tends to say you're chosen or you're not.
Except that he was an Episcopalian who went to the Church of Scotland (Reformed/Calvinist) church seeking the kind of public expression of repentance common in the Church of Scotland at the time.
Maybe the spiritual style of his own church didn't allow for public expressions of repentance because Calvinism tends to say you're chosen or you're not.
Except that he was an Episcopalian who went to the Church of Scotland (Reformed/Calvinist) church seeking the kind of public expression of repentance common in the Church of Scotland at the time.
There is an interesting story in the records of a neighbouring church. In 1791, William, an Episcopalian, approached his local Church of Scotland and asked to be summonsed for discipline. They refused as he wasn't a member of their congregation. He then made a pest of himself, approaching the minister and various elders individually. Eventually they caved, and summonsed him, at which point he told them that he had committed adultery with a neighbour, Margaret, a widow, who had fallen pregnant, although he wasn't sure whether he was the father of the child.
The church agreed he could undergo public repentance. One elder suggested they could benefit from the situation by also fining him, but the other elders said that the impact of any fine would be felt more by his wife and children than him, and they did not fine him.
He did two Sundays in the Place of Repentance. Generally a member of the congregation would do at least three Sundays for adultery, but they seemed mindful that he wasn't a member of the congregation.
I don't know why he felt the need to be publicly disciplined by a church he did not attend. Possibly he was tormented by guilt? Possibly his neighbours were Presbyterian and he felt under pressure? I don't know what form any censure from his own church would have taken, but presumably it would have been less public.
There is a tragic backstory:
Margaret had travelled into Aberdeen to conceal the pregnancy, and had killed the baby. She was imprisoned. It would be understandable if William was wracked with guilt.
What was the place of repentance and what did they do?
What was the place of repentance and what did they do?
In most Church of Scotland churches in the late C18th there was "the stool of repentance" or "cutty stool" at the front of the church, usually under the pulpit, where the person sat, sometimes in sackcloth. Some churches had something more like a lectern where the person stood. The whole congregation could see the person; it was intended to be shaming.
It was often occupied! An illegitimate birth could result in the man repenting for three Sundays followed by the woman for three Sundays. Adultery was worse than ante-nuptial fornication; William got off very lightly! But then, he wasn't a member of the congregation, and so shouldn't really have been there at all!
It wasn't that unusual for someone to approach the Session and ask to be disciplined; in the case of a pregnancy / birth it was going to become obvious anyway, and getting the discipline out of the way ahead of a birth simplified getting the baby baptised promptly. Also, in the late C18th the church provided Poor Relief - if an unmarried woman was going to have to ask the church for financial assistance, she would want to have the discipline over and done with to be in good standing - there are examples in our records in which women were on the stool for the duration of the service and then were given money or food before they left the church.
@North East Quine Neat! And it's interesting how the focus is so heavily on sexual mores. I guess crimes of property or violence would be taken more seriously, so the church's domain was consensual improprieties. Though punishing someone for being poor...ah, protestant work ethic strikes again!
My other thought is with church shopping, the way that Americans don't have a parish the way they did. We have a mess of overlapping, gently competing churches in the same turf, often far too many for the number of parishioners. So it raises all kinds of weird disciplinary questions if a person decides they're looking for a particular kind of discipline. And shopping for discipline does something interesting to the concept of discipline. Maybe our William was just ahead of his time in trying to find the right church to meet his spiritual needs.
Or maybe he was just trying to go to a church where not everyone was all up in his private business.
I wonder in this case if there is something like a mixed marriage in the background. Nothing like your father-in-law saying, unless you repent properly and take the cutty stool, I am going to cut your wife out of my will unless she separates from you!
Originally posted by Bullfrog: And it's interesting how the focus is so heavily on sexual mores.
Mostly, but also blasphemy and neighbour disputes, when one neighbour said that another neighbour had slandered them etc.
In terms of sexual mores, all the occupations open to unmarried women were poorly paid. The church did its level best to make sure that men financially supported any babies they fathered, but if the couple were unmarried, that was not easy. And men could always deny paternity. Payments from the Poor Fund to maintain illegitimate children meant that there was less in the pot to help elderly widows, orphans, the sick etc etc.
Although it looks as though the church took a prurient interest in people's sex lives, I think a lot of it was also financial. I researched a woman from my parish who was widowed in 1814, her early 20s, with a toddler. Obviously she received help from the Poor Fund. But then she had an illegitimate child, and the father left the parish, so more poor relief, then another child, and that father also left the parish, so more relief, and then another child, with the man she named categorically denying responsibility (and she did tell the Session that it had been too dark to see his face properly...) She was earning small amounts by taking in washing and sick nursing, but she was never able to support herself. She was still receiving some help when she died, aged 80, although by then the state had taken over most of the responsibility for poor relief. That sort of situation - someone requiring financial help for over 60 years - was every church treasurer's worst nightmare.
I've had that impression: It's kind of contemporary American to think that sexual ethics are all about lust and "purity culture," but really it's about economics. In a scarce society, children are expensive and everybody is terrified of "more mouths to feed." I think this also feeds into some attitudes about the social welfare state. People are just accustomed to a culture where "of course we can't afford to support indolence!"
And seeing repeat cases like this is how evidently charitable people can seem to become very mean over time.
Comments
I am being stimulated by Hannah Arendt on work at the moment and she's really interesting on fabrication - the process of creating the human world with work. The problem as she identifies it is that this turns everything into a means-ends continuum: you cut the tree down to make the table which you need to have the meeting which you need to run the organisation.. and so on. There is no "end" because each end is defined as a means for something else and the intrinsic value of every thing is lost.
In another sense it is a triumph of accounting and economics in that one knows the worth of everything and the value of nothing.
So going back to trees, we have the paradoxical situation of having permanently changed the atmosphere with the work (in Hannah A's distinction) of burning fossil fuels to power the fabrication of the human artifact, but we can only understand the remedial effects of what we might do to rebalance things in terms of their utility. Trees become theoretical units of carbon and their processes in the human conception become inefficient/efficient ways to store carbon depending on what the question is that is being asked and by whom. There's a form of violence in all these activities, which we justify as means to an end even though the end is never really achieved, largely because we have lost the vision of whatever it was that we were trying to do under a (metaphorical) pile of paperwork and blueprints of clever new inventions.
Other people, nature and everything else become pawns in some greater narrative. It's "not great" that this woman hurt herself, but won't someone please think of the real victims in this event, me and mine. We are the soldiers fighting for the noble cause, these other things are unfortunate collateral damage.
It is being done, especially where farmland has become marginal. Old abandoned farms are being restored to prairie. You can plant a prairie by preparing the site thoroughly, choosing the right native species for your soil and sun, and managing weeds aggressively during the first 2–3 years.
Just last night we watched a program on Washington Agriculture were owners of an overused, depleted farm were restoring the land to prairie. It can be done.
Good stuff. There's a patch out here on the lakefront that's nice. But it takes some work.
Though I do believe this is a tangent...
Interesting as trees and prairies are, this thread is about divine self-pardon. If anyone wants to discuss the merits and demerits of tree-planting, please start a new thread.
North East Quine, Purgatory host
Hostly hat off
Indeed. So I assume he means sacramental confession.
Yes that's exactly what I meant. Wouldn't such a confession of a grave sin like this usually involve the imposition of a pretty severe penance alongside the granting of absolution?
The church agreed he could undergo public repentance. One elder suggested they could benefit from the situation by also fining him, but the other elders said that the impact of any fine would be felt more by his wife and children than him, and they did not fine him.
He did two Sundays in the Place of Repentance. Generally a member of the congregation would do at least three Sundays for adultery, but they seemed mindful that he wasn't a member of the congregation.
I don't know why he felt the need to be publicly disciplined by a church he did not attend. Possibly he was tormented by guilt? Possibly his neighbours were Presbyterian and he felt under pressure? I don't know what form any censure from his own church would have taken, but presumably it would have been less public.
There is a tragic backstory:
Christian is Christian. Church-shopping like that feels pretty natural to a 21st century American, but at the time I suppose that would have been a more dramatic thing to do. And if he's not a total narcissist, I can't imagine him not feeling some kind of guilt about the whole affair.
Argh! Misread that bit. Thanks for catching that.
What was the place of repentance and what did they do?
Point. I will hereby revoke my misplaced reflections.
In most Church of Scotland churches in the late C18th there was "the stool of repentance" or "cutty stool" at the front of the church, usually under the pulpit, where the person sat, sometimes in sackcloth. Some churches had something more like a lectern where the person stood. The whole congregation could see the person; it was intended to be shaming.
It was often occupied! An illegitimate birth could result in the man repenting for three Sundays followed by the woman for three Sundays. Adultery was worse than ante-nuptial fornication; William got off very lightly! But then, he wasn't a member of the congregation, and so shouldn't really have been there at all!
It wasn't that unusual for someone to approach the Session and ask to be disciplined; in the case of a pregnancy / birth it was going to become obvious anyway, and getting the discipline out of the way ahead of a birth simplified getting the baby baptised promptly. Also, in the late C18th the church provided Poor Relief - if an unmarried woman was going to have to ask the church for financial assistance, she would want to have the discipline over and done with to be in good standing - there are examples in our records in which women were on the stool for the duration of the service and then were given money or food before they left the church.
My other thought is with church shopping, the way that Americans don't have a parish the way they did. We have a mess of overlapping, gently competing churches in the same turf, often far too many for the number of parishioners. So it raises all kinds of weird disciplinary questions if a person decides they're looking for a particular kind of discipline. And shopping for discipline does something interesting to the concept of discipline. Maybe our William was just ahead of his time in trying to find the right church to meet his spiritual needs.
Or maybe he was just trying to go to a church where not everyone was all up in his private business.
And it's interesting how the focus is so heavily on sexual mores.
Mostly, but also blasphemy and neighbour disputes, when one neighbour said that another neighbour had slandered them etc.
In terms of sexual mores, all the occupations open to unmarried women were poorly paid. The church did its level best to make sure that men financially supported any babies they fathered, but if the couple were unmarried, that was not easy. And men could always deny paternity. Payments from the Poor Fund to maintain illegitimate children meant that there was less in the pot to help elderly widows, orphans, the sick etc etc.
Although it looks as though the church took a prurient interest in people's sex lives, I think a lot of it was also financial. I researched a woman from my parish who was widowed in 1814, her early 20s, with a toddler. Obviously she received help from the Poor Fund. But then she had an illegitimate child, and the father left the parish, so more poor relief, then another child, and that father also left the parish, so more relief, and then another child, with the man she named categorically denying responsibility (and she did tell the Session that it had been too dark to see his face properly...) She was earning small amounts by taking in washing and sick nursing, but she was never able to support herself. She was still receiving some help when she died, aged 80, although by then the state had taken over most of the responsibility for poor relief. That sort of situation - someone requiring financial help for over 60 years - was every church treasurer's worst nightmare.
And seeing repeat cases like this is how evidently charitable people can seem to become very mean over time.