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Culture, Language and the Tower of Babel
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
-Excerpt from Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
The tower of Babel story is a baffling one. You know the drill – people want to “make a name for themselves” by making a cool building, a celebration of early civilization, and then God decides to topple the house…
Kierkegaard, Honesty, and Grace (200 Years Later)
Three days past Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday, some great articles have cropped up examining his legacy. The New York Times, for instance, featured a great mini-summary of his legacy; more interestingly, at aeon, atheist Julian Baggini writes a fantastic essay about his personal relationship with Kierkegaard’s thought:
He was an existentialist a century before Jean-Paul Sarte, more rigorously post-modern than postmodernism, and a theist whose attacks on religion bit far deeper than many of those of today’s new atheists. Kierkegaard is not so much a thinker for our time but a timeless thinker, whose work is pertinent for all ages yet destined…
Who’s Afraid of Modern Art?
Last Wednesday, Mbird friend and conference speaker Dan Siedell visited Charlottesville and gave a wonderful talk on modern art and Christianity. What made the talk compelling – among other things – was its confessional bent, an admittedly unshakable love of modern art despite questions as to its usefulness and a constant difficulty to justify that love along religious grounds. Rather than a forced dialogue between Christianity and modern art, we see two genuine, agenda-less loves of both, striving to come to terms with each other in an honest, profound, and emotionally charged way. But enough by way of intro: some of the…
America / Books / Film / Humor / Identity / Interviews / Poetry / Psychology / Suffering / Theology / Week In Review
Another Week Ends: Underconfidence, Kate Middleton’s Picnics, Unreported Medical Advice, D.H. Lawrence’s Christian Wonder, the Double-Bind of Summer Movies, More Christian Wiman, and (Way) Too Much Sociology
1. How confident are you? Over at The New York Times, David Brooks surveyed his readers to get a sense for self-confidence, lack thereof, and the ways males and females experience confidence differently. While the word itself is a bit vague and murky, and Brooks found few trends in the survey data, the individual responses are definitely worth a look:
But it was really hard to see consistent correlations and trends. The essays were highly idiosyncratic, and I don’t want to impose a false order on them that isn’t there. Let me just string together some of the interesting points…
Francis Spufford’s Good Friday: Communication, Emotion, and Atonement
Continuing our recent flurry of (irresistible) Francis Spufford posts, his writing on Jesus in Unapologetic [spoiler alert!] is some of the most fresh I’ve ever read. Thornton Wilder called for “new persuasive words“, and Spufford’s imaginative, playful (non-)apology for Christianity gives the kind of new angle on old news that any writer or theologian could envy. Here we turn to Christ’s death and resurrection, and Spufford’s attempt to circumvent loaded, often-difficult intellectual language to address the emotions:
He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much…And yet he goes on taking in. It…
Mary Karr, Mini-Lives, and News From Across the (Human/Robot Divide)
Reading Mary Karr’s fantastic memoir Lit, one quote in particular stuck out to me as beautifully describing a tendency we humans have to fall into more limited emotional ranges:
…anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings – sorrow, fury, joy – I had their junior counterparts – anxiety, irritation, excitement.
I don’t want to read into Karr’s emotional experiences, but for me this passage elucidates the emotional life lived in times when the Law, or demand to achieve, is…
Knowing Me, Knowing You – Francis Spufford’s Vision of the Church
After reading some great passages and recommendations for Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic, I’ve finally gone through it, and the hype is well-deserved. As a rejoinder to the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, Spufford’s book faces the task of affirming Christianity, while at the same time admitting its weaknesses. And who knows, maybe these two things go together? They certainly do in his view of the Christian Church:
The vision is of an intrinsically imperfect cosmos, hairlined through and through with flaws, chipped and battered and patched.
So of all things, Christianity isn’t supposed to be about gathering up the good people (shiny! happy! squeaky clean!)…
Mockingbird at the Movies: Reflections on Life of Pi
“When every link is a separation, when we understand our communicating with God to be scratches on a wall, the complexity of life does not have to be evaded; we do not cease to wonder and wander, but merely are assured our wondering and wandering are not futile.”
-Matthew Sitman, on Christian Wiman
The Life of Pi struck me at first as a shallow film, with a couple of aphorisms about religion (a house with “room for doubt on every floor”), a movie that excelled in some areas – with four well-deserved Oscars – but something without as much depth as it tries…
Argo, “Best” Picture of the Year
Or is it? I suspect not, but that’s not the main issue. Critics have reacted against the movie since it won Best Picture, but for misguided reasons: it’s self-congratulatory for the film industry, it plays at a cynicism about US foreign affairs in the opening storyboard sequence only to annul that sentiment with a feel-good CIA story, etc. Its politics are too narrowminded to meet an expanding, globalized world. All of this is arguably true (I’m sympathetic to it), but why is no one talking about the flat characters, their near-total lack of development, the implausibly “this-is-the-intelligence-world” dialogue, the usually…
No One Knows the Law (Like John Fitzgerald Page): Buckhead Nightlife and the Search for Identity
While DZ is recovering from a trip to Liberate in Fort Lauderdale, here’s one of his favorite identity stories from Gawker, the ballad of “Nightmare Online Dater” John Fitzgerald Page, who received a wink on Match.com and promptly responded with an email laden with identity assertions, ticking off all the boxes that many of us, truthfully, would like brag about ourselves, if only we met the criteria:
I live in a 31 story high rise condominium, right in the middle of the Buckhead nightlife district. Do you ever come to this area of town to shop/go out/visit/explore?
I went to an Ivy…
Short Story Wednesdays: “A Father’s Story” by Andre Dubus
This week, we turn to Andre Dubus’s “A Father’s Story”, available here.
“Ethics demands an infinite movement, it demands disclosure. The aesthetic hero, then, can speak but will not.”
-S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
On July 23, 1986, Andre Dubus pulled over onto the side of the road to help a couple of strangers, male and female, having car trouble. An oncoming car swerved and was about to hit them; Dubus pushed the woman out of the way and, as a result, was hit himself and remained confined to a wheelchair for final thirteen years of his life.
As we saw with O’Connor’s lupus…
Desire, Beauty, and Mercy: The Romance of Grace by Jim McNeely
The old commandment presses upon us the obligation to love, but the new commandment releases us into the power of love. He commands the wind and the waves, and they are calm. He commands us to love by first loving us, and so creates the love He desires. It is of grace, because love responds only to affection and not to coercion or force. Love, by grace, must make itself desirable to our hearts by sheer miracle or our hearts will not autonomously engage with affection.
Mbird friend Jim McNeely just released his new book, The Romance of Grace, and we…
Love, Addiction, and Psychotherapy: Paul Tillich’s Ethics
We all have our doubts about Tillich (heresy, philandering, or the embarrassingly earnest Christian existentialist phase you had in college), but he crafted some seriously good Protestant ethics in a small tract called Morality and Beyond. With his trademark psychological acumen, he’s one of the few ethicists who casts the question in Law/Grace terminology. I have my doubts, too, but the narrative he traces is a compelling one, and it produces passages of startling insight.
First, humans, unlike God, are different in our existence from the way we are in our essence. This idea has been central for centuries in Christian…
Another Week Ends: Townes Van Zandt, Hyper-Parents and Filial Competence, Jane Austen, Visible Signs (That You Were A Youth Group Kid), Girls, Christian Athletes, Jonah Lehrer Proves Himself, More Ash Wednesday, St. Paul, and Beck
1. Over at Internet Monk, a thoughtful Ash Wednesday article explores singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt’s legacy in relation to the way Americans process death, depression, powerlessness, or other ‘negative’ emotions:
Of course we live in a culture of death — because we are human, and human beings die, and human beings often choose ways that lead to death rather than life. My question is how we deal with this fact.
…We the people will watch violence and death on our TV screens and computer monitors, but we continue to hide our dying ones away in hospitals and nursing homes. We spend the vast…
Rowan Williams on the Power and the Weakness
From his Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to the Christian Faith, an accessible, theologically grounded, and refreshing take on the ‘basics’ of Christianity:
Yes, Jesus is a human being in whom God’s action is at work without interruption or impediment. But wait a moment: the Jesus we meet in the Gospels is someone who prays, who speaks of putting his will and his decisions at the service of his Father. He is someone who is in a relationship of dependence on the one he prays to as Father. In him there is divine purpose, power, and action; but there is also humility, responsiveness,…
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