This past Sunday many people celebrated that Jesus rose from the dead — proving his claims true, defeating death and laying demands on the world. This has infinite implications that demand a careful consideration: What are the objections to the resurrection? How are they answered? And how must we respond?

The original objection was made by the Jewish authorities. They claimed Jesus’ disciples had stolen his body and fabricated the resurrection. But the tomb was guarded by Roman soldiers, and at the time of his death his disciples were scattered and scared. Peter, one of the leaders of the disciples, when asked by a servant girl denied even knowing Jesus. Instead of defending Christ, his followers holed up in a room with the doors locked for fear that they too would soon be punished as insurrectionists or blasphemers. They were in no mood for staging a resurrection conspiracy, announcing that Jesus was alive, and then launching a campaign to convert the entire known world with that claim. However, in a few days that is exactly what they would be doing, though it would cost them their lives.

Some argue that the Romans moved the body. However, Rome did not welcome Christianity, and would have gladly ended it had it been able. If they had the body, they could have produced it and immediately stopped Christianity. This never happened.

Others claim that Jesus’ resurrection was a collective hallucination. This is untenable because of the multiple people, places, and times Jesus appeared after his death. There were more than 70 witnesses, who saw the resurrected Jesus at different times and places over the course of several weeks.

Additionally, the definitive account of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection appeared while those who knew him were still alive, and no one argued with it, because it was exactly as they had seen it happen. If you are going to write propaganda, you wait until the people who can contradict you are dead. The non-canonical gospels didn’t appear until after those who knew Jesus personally had all died, between the second and fourth centuries. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all appeared — and were widely accepted and distributed — within the first century A.D.

Finally, the claim that Jesus did not rise from the dead because resurrection is impossible is a claim that presumes omniscience. Unless someone knows all things in all space and all time, then he cannot claim anything is impossible. By definition, God is omniscient and omnipotent. Thus, resurrection is impossible unless God decides otherwise: and it seems he has.

This has massive implications. Because Jesus rose from the dead, his words are proven true. His resurrection validates everything he said. There is hope because he said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25-26). Because he rose from the dead, death itself has been defeated through him. Simultaneously, there is a demand. We cannot remain ambivalent or apathetic towards him. He demands that we sacrifice our perceived autonomy and find our greatest joy in God himself. We cannot live as we want without consequence, because he determines reality. In light of Jesus’ resurrection, life is charged with both infinite hope and infinite danger, demanding more than ambivalence in our consideration of him.

“[North Korea] is a human paradise in which Jesus would have nothing to do even if he came,” according to an article on North Korea’s state-run website. Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, it adds, embraces his people in “ever shining arms of eternal life and happiness.”

But the United Nations Human Rights Council disagrees, as evidenced by a report filed recently describing prison camps throughout the nation that rival those of Hitler and Stalin in their scope and brutality. On Friday, the council called for action to be taken against North Korea, submitting a resolution which, if successful, would hold North Korean government officials liable to arrest outside their borders. According to World Magazine, “Thirty member nations of the Human Rights Council voted in favor the resolution, and 11 abstained. China, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan, Vietnam and Venezuela voted against it.”

North Korea’s United Nations ambassador So Se Pyong told the council, “In [North Korea] we have a proverb saying ‘Mind your own business.’ One needs to see his or her face in the mirror to check how nasty it is before talking about the others.”

In situations such as these, minding our own business would be a crime, Mr. Pyong. China, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan, Vietnam and Venezuela are wrong in their treatment of their citizens. Of course there are times when minding our own business is exactly what we ought to do. There are times we didn’t mind our own business and ought to have. We cannot police the world — any organization with power and authority to do so is too powerful and too authoritative and will inevitably become more corrupt than those it polices. This, however, is one of those instances when it is wrong not to act: many are calling it “the worst human tragedy in the world.” Starvation is rampant. Timothy Kang, who escaped from the prisons, described prisoners that looked like “skeletons barely covered with skin.” Inmates catch rats and snakes and ask their guards for permission to eat them. Some mothers are malnourished to the point where they cannot feed their infants, and the babies die. Forced abortions and infanticide is common. One female inmate was raped by a platoon leader; after the baby was born, the mother and her newborn were locked in a detention house. The mother soon went missing. The infant was fed to dogs. These and numerous other atrocities have been reported by over 300 escaped witnesses. In light of this, we are obliged to act.

“Thou shalt not kill” does not only forbid: by implication, it demands. It requires that we do all we lawfully can to preserve life. The United Nations must recognize this and take action, or it will become complicit in the crimes. Now that our knowledge of crimes we have guessed at for decades is certain, failure to intervene is tacit approval. To know what is happening, to be able to intervene, and then to abdicate this responsibility is to be guilty of murder.

Smart home hubs — the automated aspects of your home, synchronized through your smart phone — are trending. You can wake up in the morning to music playing, coffee brewing and the thermostat already turned up. You can set your lights and heat to come on 15 minutes before you normally get home from work. The question the tech blogs are asking is which system is most comprehensive and glitch-free. The question no one is asking is whether or not this technology is a good thing in the first place.

Maybe no one is asking this question because the answer seems so obvious. Who wouldn’t want to wake up to a warm house, brewed coffee and wireless speakers playing that famous Bach cello prelude? What harm could there possibly be in this? These devices promise increased convenience and increased efficiency — greater comfort and freedom from mundane tasks to do what really matters. If we have the power to increase convenience and efficiency, why wouldn’t we use it? These are thoroughly engrained American values.

Smart home hubs are not inherently evil. They may be very helpful. Convenience, in moderation, is a good thing. I do have a problem, however, with the uncritical acceptance of technology, with the lack of dialogue about the costs of the technologies we so readily accept. We hear of the benefits, but every innovation is a compromise of something else. We need to weigh the costs against the benefits, and if the cost is too high, to forego convenience and efficiency for the sake of our humanity.

What is the cost of smart home hubs? First, they remove physical human labor from a number of tasks. Instead of getting up and making the coffee yourself, a machine does it for you. It becomes a middleman between you and reality. Thus the human body becomes increasingly involved only in consumption and not production; and the body becomes little more than a vehicle for the mind. As Wendell Berry writes in “The Unsettling of America,” “Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless…because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few other employable muscles back and forth to work.” Smart home hubs only encourage this trend.

Second, this technology also interrupts human interaction. It means you aren’t making the coffee for your roommate. Instead of getting up and turning up the heat for the others in the home to wake up to — or stoking the fire in the woodstove — the smart home hub has the heat already turned up for you. This costs us things like Robert Hayden expressed in his poem “Those Winter Sundays”: “Sundays too my father got up early / and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,/then with cracked hands that ached/from labor in the weekday weather made / banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. / … What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” Relegate the heat to a slick, automatic machine, and this sentiment is lost.

Finally, technology limits little inconveniences. But no technology can limit big inconveniences, and so, when these big inconveniences come, we increasingly don’t have any established way to deal with them. We need to encounter little inconveniences in order to be steady, self-controlled, self-sacrificial people. The small habitual inconveniences, the small habitual layers of self-sacrifice, prepare us for the inevitable larger ones.

These are not costs we often consider, because they are difficult to quantify. But they are very real, and far too much to pay for the sake of a little increased convenience. We cannot afford to overlook these questions, or take an uncritical approach to new technologies.

Bowdoin College, in an effort to minimize discrimination, no longer tolerates historic Christianity. The right to promote and defend homosexuality has superseded the right to promote and defend Christianity. Differences of opinion on this issue have been disallowed. But the real debate is not one of tolerance at all, but of right and wrong — and who determines them.

If not in words, this is what Bowdoin has implied by its actions. College officials have banned Robert Gregory, a local lawyer and longtime volunteer staff of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, from leading campus Bible studies with students. The college told the Gregory and his wife Sim — also a volunteer — that they had to sign a non-discrimination agreement: in the words of Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster, “If someone is participating in an organization and they are LGBTIQA — lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, questioning or asexual — and they are not allowed to participate in that organization because of their sexual orientation or they cannot lead that organization because of their sexual orientation, then that’s discrimination.” The Gregorys responded that signing this agreement would be a violation of their faith, and proposed an amendment that would allow a reservation for their religious beliefs. This would not force them to teach and practice anything inconsistent with their Christian faith. The proposed amendment was rejected, and as the Gregorys refused to sign the agreement without it, they have been ordered to leave. According to “The Maine Wire,” “Although [college officials] allege the [Bowdoin Christian Fellowship, or BCF] has engaged in discrimination, [none] provided Gregory with an example of such discrimination. Gregory said Bowdoin’s new policy is not a reaction to anything BCF leaders or members have done.”

This instance illustrates a major problem in the discrimination rhetoric. Common conception is that intolerance and discrimination themselves are wrong, that they are inherently immoral practices. This rhetoric is internally inconsistent, because it discriminates against discrimination and is intolerant of intolerance. This is logically absurd. You cannot be against being against things.

Thus the issue is not one of tolerance and discrimination at all, but one of conflicting moral standards. As a society we agree that theft is wrong, so we do not tolerate theft. We are intolerant of thieves. That does not mean we hate thieves, but it means we understand that their behavior is wrong, detrimental to themselves and to society as a whole. The real debate about homosexuality is not of tolerance, but of disagreement about what to be tolerant of. The discussion must move past tolerance to what is right and what is wrong.

However, there is a problem here: how are right and wrong decided? Is the distinction based merely on the opinion of the majority, the elite or the media? And who decides who decides what is right and what is wrong? For theists, the answer is simple: God decides, not us. We would not dare to claim to know what is right and wrong on our own — we believe that is dangerous arrogance. For those who don’t believe in God, and those who don’t believe God communicates truth to us, the only source is the self. Without God, morality becomes a matter of opinion. This is the real struggle behind the homosexuality debate: what is moral, and who decides?

The University of Maine exists because of a federal act concerned with agriculture — the Morrill Act of 1862, which granted land for the establishment of public universities throughout the country for “the endowment, support and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be … to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts … in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life.” This stands in a tradition of American thought going back to the early days of the nation. Thomas Jefferson considered a liberally educated, landholding farmer to be the most important member of the state. Jefferson’s idea that the farmer should be liberally educated — and not, in an academic setting, given any vocational or specialized agricultural training — is startling. His idea that this farmer would be then the most valuable type of citizen is unheard of in contemporary mainstream culture. Because this Jeffersonian ideal is so far removed from our current cultural consciousness, it is tempting to discredit it as outmoded and impossible in our post-industrialized world — but something that drastic may be precisely what our society needs.

For decades culture has been plagued by the dichotomy — and at times even the opposition — of the theoretical and the practical. The negative effects this has had are so pervasive, we hardly notice them. But consider the land-grant universities created by the Morrill Act: the diminishing liberal arts are viewed as impractical, as a means to no real economic end, other than to perpetuate the cycle by becoming a liberal arts teacher of others who will become liberal arts teachers, and the applied sciences specialize to the exclusion of cultural heritage, ethics and value. As Wendell Berry writes in ‘The Unsettling of America”, “The land-grant colleges … first reduced ‘liberal and practical’ to ‘liberal,’ and then for ‘practical’ they substituted ‘specialized.’ And the standard of their purpose has shifted from usefulness to careerism.” Thus, value and use become detached. Value is kept largely abstract; use is kept largely pragmatic. Without use, value is impotent; without value, use is exploitative. When they are separated, they are of no lasting worth at all.

My grandfather is the antithesis of this split. He lives in an old, yellow farmhouse on the high ridge of the Horseback Road, with fields sloping down to woods on either side. Each year he and his wife cultivate an extensive garden, a raspberry patch and a small apple orchard, as well as haying the fields. Before his arthritis became too severe, he tapped the trees every March. He has a master’s degree in English from the University of Maine and a master’s degree from Westminster Theological Seminary. He retired from teaching high school English some years ago, but continues to serve as an elder at his church and as the moderator for the town meetings. He sings in a barbershop chorus, plays piano and has memorized loads of poetry. He will leave a tremendous spiritual and philosophical inheritance to his children and grandchildren, as well as to his church and his town — and by extension, to his state and his country. He is invested in politics because he owns land and lives off that land, and he is highly and liberally educated. This is an incarnation of the Jeffersonian ideal, where the theoretical and the practical are joined to a beneficial whole, for the good of the individual, the family and the larger culture. These are the types of citizens we need.

On Sept. 26, had he been alive, T.S. Eliot would have marked — and possibly celebrated — his 125th birthday. The Nobel Prize-winning poet is best known as the author of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land” and the “Four Quartets,” and is recognized as one of the pillars of high modernism.

His work retains all its grace and power, and remains as relevant now as when it was written: relevant to biomedical engineers, the implications of social media, and the conflict in Syria — that is, relevant to real people. He and his work are worth commemoration — but how does one commemorate a dead poet who said “Why should we celebrate / These dead men more than the dying?”

Besides reading his work aloud by a fire with friends and merlot, one can commemorate Eliot by carrying forward his vision. Among those doing this is painter, writer, and artistic catalyst Makoto Fujimura, who has founded the Fujimura Institute, which seeks collaboration with groups of artists.

Its vision is the restoration of real harmony: “Defying fractured, fragmented modern perspectives, the Fujimura Institute encourages artists and thinkers to collaborate, cooperate and inspire their audiences to piece together a whole view of the world.” Currently their foremost exhibit is a collaboration of painting and music inspired by Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”

Commemorating a dead poet is hardly the sum of the institute’s goal. The aim is art that illustrates and expresses hope: “Not a sentimental hope,” says Fujimura, but “a hope that lies beneath the rubble.” Or as Eliot wrote in the “Four Quartets”:

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

Sentimental hope is naïveté. It is hope without ground for hope. This is not the hope these artists hold fast to. Their hope is one that comprehends the brokenness with beauty, based on the ground of carefully placed faith.

Hope has been out of vogue in the arts for some time now, because many artists believe it is no more than a pleasant lie.  After the 20th century, and after the first decade of the 21st, how could it be otherwise? But this despair stems from a view of the world as broken and meaningless. For Eliot, the artists at the Fujimura Institute, and a growing number of others, it is despair which is the real lie: for Christianity teaches that although the world is broken, it will be restored.

Truth is alive with hope. It is replete with hope, if Christianity is indeed true. It may be worth looking into. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

To commemorate Eliot, I plan to schedule a fire and a reading of the “Four Quartets,” to consider his truth, to seize his hope, and to return to my own work with a burning mind.

John used to get up every morning and make a half-hour commute (if the traffic was favorable — more often it was like College Ave. at 3:30 in the afternoon). He would arrive at his office and then spend his day there producing something he didn’t care about for someone he didn’t know who lived someplace he’d never been. He never got the product himself. He was paid for his work, of course, but that was only every other Friday. After work he would return to his apartment (one of the lovely identical-to-its-neighbors ones), microwave some soup from a can and turn on the TV. So, his days were spent producing things for other people, and his evenings were spent eating food someone else processed in a factory long ago and enjoying entertainment produced professionally by no one he knew. He was a specialist among specialists. No doubt it was a rich and satisfying experience.

Most things in our culture are consigned to specialists: mechanics fix cars, doctors fix bodies, chefs (or machines) fix food, musicians make music. Most of us are training to become specialists: nurses, engineers and English teachers. What’s wrong with that? As Socrates claims in Plato’s “Republic”: “We are not all alike; there are diversities of natures among us which are adapted to different occupations … And will you have a work better done when the workman has many occupations, or when he has only one?” Specialization should result in better product quality and variety. I need specialists. I have no idea how to replace my car’s head gasket. I have no idea how to perform triple-bypass surgery. If I tried to build a house it would be ugly and structurally unsound. Specialists are necessary for a functional society.

However, just because something is good doesn’t mean we should have as much of it as possible. Over-specialization strips away a person’s involvement in his own life and the life of his immediate community. It outsources a person’s own life, and it eventually outsources the community’s life as well, as specialists far away can provide things more cheaply. As author Wendell Berry writes in “The Unsettling of America”: “What happens under the rule of specialization is that, though society becomes more and more intricate, it has less and less structure. It becomes more and more organized, but less and less orderly. The community disintegrates…just as the individual character loses the sense of…responsible involvement.” The result of over-specialization is personal and cultural impoverishment.

Recently I spent a few days at a cabin with no electricity and no running water. It was raining heavily, so we spent our time inside. We built a fire in the woodstove and cooked our meals from scratch. We told stories, recited poetry, sang songs, played guitar, drank coffee and watched the rain descending outside over the sloping green fields, and beyond, over the shaggy, dark woods. When there was a break in the rain, we began digging a hole for an outhouse. It would have been faster, of course, if there had been a backhoe. And there are those who could have made better food, told better stories (complete with special effects and a big screen), and sang and played guitar more skillfully. But it would not have been more satisfying, because it would not have been our work. There is something unique to the taste of bread you baked yourself.

Admittedly, this was at a cabin in the woods, and these things are easier to commit to there because they are necessary. I’m not advocating we all go off the grid and throw our computers out the window—I’m just advocating a little more thoughtfulness throughout our daily lives, and a little more involvement in our daily bread. It is difficult. It is sweaty and slow. And it is entirely worth it.

Seth Dorman is a fourth-year English major with a concentration in creative writing from Hermon, Maine