Thank God for the Language Police

Language is powerful. Without its mediating role, we would be unable to grasp reality. Did you know there was a Language Police out there? Someone needed to do it. Words are misused, overused and a-bused here in the Information Age. Lake Superior State University has been compiling a list of banned words worn slick with overuse for the past thirty years. I think the official list comes out tomorrow. You can read about it here as well.

Here's What I Want For Christmas...

I want the Giant Swiss Army Knife. Just think of the jams MacGyver could have gotten out of with this beast. You can read more abou tthe Giant below or read the full story here.

Just as you can't be too rich or too thin, I'd always thought, so you can't have too many tools on your Swiss Army knife - but that was before I took delivery of the new Giant Swiss Army knife. Grotesque, if superbly engineered, the Giant weighs nearly a kilogram and features 85 devices in all. Unload this mother into the plastic tray as you walk through security at Heathrow and just see what happens.

The Giant is supposed to feature every blade that has ever been incorporated into Swiss Army knives as made by Wenger, one of the two firms that make them . "We've sold 20 to retailers so far, and we can't get them in fast enough," says Garry Woodhouse of Whitby and Co, sole importer of Wenger knives into Britain. "They're assembled by hand in Switzerland, and I'm told that the man doing it is working his fingers to the bone."

From Cross to Crescent

I just found this at Touchstone's Mere Comments blog. I just can't help but think that the people who sold the church building to the Islamic association must not have any sense of church history--in addition to possessing a poor theology.

Catholic relations with Orthodoxy bring pope to Turkey

Just found this.

"St. Clive's Day"

Of course, today is the day that we remember the assassination of JFK. It is also, as many already know, the day that C.S. Lewis (and Aldous Huxley) died. I heard once--and it may well be more legendary than factual--that Lewis had always prayed that he would die in anonymity. With JFK's being struck down here in Dallas, he was granted that prayer. I don't necessarily doubt that this story is true. Lewis knew that at the heart of all reality there is a fundamental self-denial and humility--a giving up of a lesser good for a greater. Here's one of my favorite quotations by the Oxford don:

For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being. For the Eternal Word also gives Himself in sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary....From before the foundation of the world He surrenders begotten Deity back to bgetting Deity in obedience...From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so on forever. This is not a heavenly law we can escape by being saved. What is outside the system of self-giving is not earth, nor nature, nor 'ordinary life,' but simply and solely Hell.

Brown University Suspends PCA College Group

Brown University has suspended the Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) at Brown from using campus resources and has given vague reasons as to why. Apparently, there are some rules against "proselytizing" and "harassment" that groups allowed to use university facilities are supposed to abide by. David Sherwood (who, I believe, used to be a PCA pastor here in N. Texas? Maybe?) had this to say:

"My impression of Brown is it's a liberal institution in the best sense: it's a marketplace of ideas," he said. "All we've ever wanted is a place at the table."

You can read more here.

Young people in developed countries unhappy, survey says

Found this interesting piece tonight. Here's one provocative line from the article:

"The happier young people of the developing world are also the most religious," the survey said.

I recently read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard Address with a group of students at school. There are some real resonances between his words and what has apparently been discovered through this study.

Orthodox priest beheaded in Iraq

Just found this.

An Excerpt from Benedict's Lecture

The emperor [Manuel Ii Paleologus] goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.
God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death....
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: "For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality." Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.

Those last few sentences are of chief interest. Sure, God's transcendence should be guarded, and He is not bound to reveal himself--especially through any material means. But He does. That's central to the Gospel. God uses the familiar to reveal the unfamiliar--particularly, Himself i nthe form of a man. This is scandalous to anyone with a dualistic worldview.

Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, the Pope -- Who's Next? and Benedict's Lecture

Here's an interesting article from the German Der Spiegel online. It recounts some of the history of Islamist threats towards those who offer any criticism of their policies of history.

An excerpt:

There are -- few -- critical voices that should be taken seriously when it comes to the pope's comments. Shouldn't Benedict XVI have known that the quote he included in his speech -- a passage he himself described as "brusque" -- might be misunderstood? Couldn't he have made his meaning a bit clearer? Even if he had, it should be welcomed by all, including leftist atheists and agnostics, that we now have a pope who can pose challenging academic questions. In any case, a close reading of his speech reveals not a single insult directed at a single Muslim.

Also, here's a link to Benedict's speech. There is nothing inflammatory in it.

The Man Who Claims To Be Jesus

There's a man in Florida who claims to be Jesus Christ. Seriously. He preaches no sin, no restrictions--just puredee indulgence. No, that's not indulgences--as in the medieval church practice that allowed one or a loved one a little less time in Purgatory--that's indulgence--as in indulge your senses. He's beyond heretical. He's delusional and cultic. Read more here.

Read more about Jesus Redux here.

Contemporary McCarthyism

The Path to Hysteria
My sin was to write a screenplay accurately depicting Bill Clinton's record on terrorism.
BY CYRUS NOWRASTEH

...In the era of McCarthyism, the merest hint of a connection to communism sufficed to inspire dark accusations, the certainty that the accused was part of a malign conspiracy. Today, apparently, you can get something of that effect by charging a connection with a Christian mission.

Read more here.

The Pope must die, says Muslim

A notorious Muslim extremist told a demonstration in London yesterday that the Pope should face execution.
Anjem Choudary said those who insulted Islam would be "subject to capital punishment" [...]. Choudary's appeal for the death of Pope Benedict was the second time he has been linked with apparent incitement to murder within a year.
The 39-year-old lawyer organised
demonstrations against the publication of cartoons of Mohammed in February in Denmark. Protesters carried placards declaring "Behead Those Who Insult Islam".

Read the rest here.

Nun gunned down in Somalia

I have found the response to Pope Benedict's remarks by the Muslim community a bit ironic. I do believe that we must seek to understand their position and love those who are our sworn enemies, but the plausibility of this story makes it a bit difficult.

Muslim fury grows at Pope's speech

Take a look at this article. Also, be sure to note the comments at the bottom of the page. I tend to agree with their sentiments.

Thomas Kinkade: Angel of Light Part 2

This is a bit of old news about Kinkade. It's from the LA Times, Aug. 29 2006:

The FBI is investigating allegations that self-styled "Painter of Light" Thomas Kinkade and some of his top executives fraudulently induced investors to open galleries and then ruined them financially, former dealers contacted by federal agents said. Investigators are focusing on issues raised in civil litigation by at least six former Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery owners, people who have been contacted by the FBI said.

The ex-owners allege in arbitration claims that, among other things, the artist known for his dreamily luminous landscapes and street scenes used his Christian faith to persuade them to invest in the independently owned stores, which sell only Kinkade's work."They really knew how to bait the hook," said one former dealer who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case. "They certainly used the Christian hook."Kinkade has denied the allegations in the civil litigation.

Hurt

I pulled out my guitar tonight to strum a little. I was trying to figure out this one chord (I'm still pretty much an amateur after ten years of wielding my axe) in Johnny Cash's cover of Sting's "I Hung My Head". I found a site that provided the chord. I thought I was right: It was the D Minor I kept missing. As I perused the other songs, I found a link to the "Hurt" video--the one in which Cash covers the Nine Inch Nails song. I had never seen the video before; I had only heard about it. I was moved to tears...the juxtaposed footage of the young, confident Cash with the old, ailing Cash; his "House of Cash" museum--his "empire of dirt"--sitting vacant.

I think what moves me so much in Cash's music is his insistence upon the fact that one cannot escape the consequences of his actions (this is especially important in a culture where celebrity ethics are dominant--you know: you can cheat, steal, and sleep around, but you always have an out with the creation of a new image). It's apparent in "Hurt" and also in a song like "Delia's Gone." The tone of "Delia" is lighter than its content. The song is about the narrator's paying a visit to his lover in Memphis who's "low down and trifling/ And [...] cold and mean." After binding her to a chair, he shoots her in cold blood. The mood that the tune creates laid along side of the mood created by the words is chilling. Nevertheless, the murder isn't glorified in any sense. In his jail cell, the narrator sings, "But jailer, oh, jailer/ Jailer, I can't sleep/ 'Cause all around my bedside/ I hear the patter of Delia's feet." The song ends with this lesson: "So if you woman's devilish/ You can let her run/ Or you can bring her down/ and do her Like Delia got done/ Delia's gone, one more round/ Delia's gone."

However, this "lesson" has lost much of its effect in light of the narrator's inability to shake off the memory of his murdered lover. The dead are present in "Delia" and death is imminent in the "Hurt" video. This is the second reason I admire Cash's music. In his music, death is real but not glorified. From what I remember reading, the viewing of the "Hurt" video caused a hush to fall upon the crowd at the MTV music video awards in 2003, where Cash won for "Hurt." There is not much that can cause a hush in our culture anymore. As Christians, we are called to die to ourselves everyday. I think God knew that death would always hush the maddening crowds screaming for their rights and insistent upon their happiness above all else. Perhaps that's why he made it the means to life and perhaps that's why he calls his followers to it daily. You can click here to view Hurt.

Exodus Ministry Applauds Anglican Head's 'Stand for the Truth'

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, [Rowan] Williams said, "Ethics is not a matter of a set of abstract rules, it is a matter of living the mind of Christ. That applies to sexual ethics."I don't believe inclusion is a value in itself. Welcome is. We don't say 'Come in and we ask no questions'. I do believe conversion means conversion of habits, behaviors, ideas, emotions."

You can read the rest of this article here. You can also read about Exodus.

He-Man Jesus

Traditionally, the church has understood Jesus to have been "unlovely" based on certain passages in Isaiah, etc. Nevertheless, to me, it does seem plausible that he would have had muscle mass sufficient to meet the demands of his occupation--that of a carpenter (or stone mason, as some have hypothesized). That may indeed be plausible, but this is ridiculous. This is from Purgatorio (see sidebar for link).

A Dose of Dorothy Sayers

"A society in which consumption must be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand."

Dorothy Sayers
Source: Creed or Chaos, Sophia Press, 1949, 1974, pg. 64
(you can find more quoatations on wealth and poverty here)

Regardless of how extreme one may consider Sayers' view in this quotation, it should at least make him consider how his light is spent.

Real scientists are poetic

I found this article through Arts and Letters Daily (see the sidebar for link). It's a great reminder that even scientists--with all the precise and seemingly exhaustive (but flattened) language they use to describe reality--still must resort to metaphor. Man still--even in this scientific age--must use symbols to try to grasp his world.

From the article:
"I love analogies most of all, my most reliable masters who know in particular all secrets of nature," Kepler wrote in 1604. "We have to look at them especially in geometry, when, though by means of very absurd designations, they unify infinitely many cases in the middle between two extremes, and place the total essence of a thing splendidly before the eyes."

Inspiration and Incarnation

I am putting together a theology curriculum for my new job. I found a review by Susan Wise Bauer on Peter Enn's book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. I have not read the book, but Wise Bauer's review of it causes me to believe that it would be a helpful resource for biblical study. Here's an excerpt from her piece on Enns' book:

[The] God who spoke to man through Christ also speaks to man through Scripture, and in much the same way: he enters into our world and uses our own cultural patterns to reveal himself. We cannot insist that there is a separate, ahistorical, all-divine message in any part of the Bible that somehow triumphs over all contemporary thought and custom. This, Enns writes, is a modern version of the ancient Docetic heresy, which held that Christ only seemed human. "What some ancient Christians were saying about Christ," he writes, "… is similar to the mistake that other Christians have made (and continue to make) about Scripture: it comes from God, and the marks of its humanity are only apparent, to be explained away.

To insist on an "a-historical, all-divine message in any part of the Bible" is--as Wise Bauer says of Enns book--to fall prey to the Docetist impulse (a brand of Gnosticism particularly influential in the early church) and fail to see the fundamental nature of the Incarnation not only to the Christian faith but also to all of reality and knowing.

Leithart on Why Evangelical's Can't Write

The most recent edition of Credenda Agenda is chiefly about Flannery O'Connor. An article that struck me the most was Peter Leithart's Why Evangelical's Can't Write. His thesis:

Here is a thesis, which I offer in a gleeful fit of reductionism: Modern Protestants can't write because we have no sacramental theology. Protestants will learn to write when we have reckoned with the tragic results of Marburg, and have exorcised the ghost of Zwingli from our poetics. Protestants need not give up our Protestantism to do this, as there are abundant sacramental resources within our own tradition. But contemporary Protestants do need to give up the instinctive anti-sacramentalism that infects so much of Protestantism, especially American Protestantism.

The reference above to Marburg is there because Leithart opens his article with the 1529 Colloquy at Marburg where Zwinglians and Lutherans met to debate and come to an agreement on Luther's doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist. After agreeing to fourteen of the fifteen propositions put forth by Luther, the Zwinglians--once they were home, after the colloquy--took up the cudgels once again for the Eucharist as mere memorial and the Lutherans once again fought back with their real presence position.

Leithart's argument for why evangelicals can't write goes back to this historical occasion. When the Zwinglians and Lutherans finally parted ways for good at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, the Protestant mind would forever be influenced by the rift:

Marburg is important not so much for what it achieved but as a symbol of what it failed to achieve. It provides a symbolic marker not only for the parting of the ways between Lutheran and Zwinglian, but also, for Zwinglians, the final parting of the ways between symbol and reality. J. P. Singh Uberoi claimed that "Spirit, word and sign had finally parted company at Marburg in 1529. For centuries, Christian sacramental theology had held symbol and reality together in an unsteady tension, but that alliance was ruptured by the Zwinglian view of the real presence. For Zwingli, "myth or ritual . . . was no longer literally and symbolically real and true." In short, "Zwingli was the chief architect of the new schism and . . . Europe and the world followed Zwingli in the event."
For many post-Marburg Protestants, literal truth is over here, while symbols drift off in another direction. At best, they live in adjoining rooms; at worst, in widely separated neighborhoods, and they definitely inhabit different academic departments.

More reflections on a culture's twilight years.

I thought I would add this post due to the arguments (10 non-scriptural arguments against same-sex marriage) Anthony Esolen has been developing at Mere Comments.

As far as I can discern, the strongest argument against same-sex marriage (SSM) seeks to deal with the assumptions of the SSM position--namely, that our bodies matter little and what is really essential is the "heart" i.e. what a person feels, thinks, etc. apart from what they do. Of course, what one does has largely to do with the limits placed upon them by their bodies. But in a society where gender--i.e. the body--is downplayed to make room for pure choice (choice in the abstract divorced from the body), bodily limits matter little.

I just ran into Harvey Mansfield, a long-time professor of government at Harvard, on the web. I am sure his views are controversial, but I am interested in reading more of his works. Here's an excerpt from a June 2006 article he wrote for Imprimis, the newsletter of Hillsdale College:

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), an earlier and more fundamental book than [Betty] Friedan's, had argued that women were not different from men by nature, but only by history. It was a history of oppression by men that kept women from being as aggressive and assertive as men are. With the title of her book, Beauvoir implies that men live a better life than women, that manliness is better than femininity. Since women are perfectly capable of manliness, that quality should no longer be named for one sex. Beauvoir renamed it “transcendence,” a gender-neutral term. The gender-neutral society was born and manliness as the quality of a sex was demoted to masculinity, a title that signifies such homely features as the hair on your chest and your face.

Thus feminism, in its eagerness to claim manliness for women, destroyed femininity. We began to see gangster movies with lovely actresses playing the role of hit men. Some feminists denounced the manly passion for competition and war, but in doing so they had to be careful not to imply that women are unsuited for business or for the military. Since the Sixties, we have become used to seeing women in men's occupations. Yet the gender-neutral society created by today's feminism is not in fact as neutral as it claims. Despite its dislike of the word manliness, it is on the whole friendly to the quality, now under a new name, more neutral and prosaic, such as “leadership.” On the one hand, the world seems to have been feminized, yet on the other hand, it is still a man's world, and in a strange way even more so, because both sexes are now engaged in employments that reward the manly qualities of aggression and assertiveness.

With the push for a gender-neutral society, not only is masculinity and femininity diminished, or "destroyed" as Mansfield says, but language is abused and loses its ability to carry meaning. Just look at how vague and un-concrete the words transcendence and leadership are. They are attached to nothing in our concrete experience. They're abstractions and their popularity today--or at least leadership's popularity--reveals just how threatening the particular is to our culture. Particulars--such as bodies--ostensibly restrict freedom. Notice Mansfield suggests that when the "more neutral and prosaic" term leadership was preferred over manliness, a shift in society began. But this shift was not merely about gender differences, it was a shift in language and imagination. So maybe we should say that when a language begins to lose its particular-ness, the loss of a collective meaning is not far behind--nor is all sorts of confusion--especially, the confusion of male and female.

The Evolution of a Worshipper

I found this cartoon at Texanglican's blog. It's a simple, yet apt, illustration of the change many have undergone in their discipleship. There are more at cartoonchurch.com.

More from Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen at Mere Comments has added to his "non-scriptural arguments against homosexual marriage." His #5 is especially compelling. I once had a professor at the University of Dallas make the comment that those of us living in a post-Freudian age can no longer enjoy deep friendships among people of the same sex. The reason? Freud's musings have pathologized all such friendships. One cannot have a friendship such as the one David had with Jonathan in the Old Testament without a suspicious eye immediately darting their way. Esolen's thoughts are similar:

If homosexuality is at the least not publicly condoned, then that may clear away sufficient ground for men to forge the emotionally fulfilling friendships that they once enjoyed in the past. Such friendships have been at the base of many a cultural renaissance [...]. But the point is that the prohibition is public, and helps constitute the meaning, to oneself and to others, of one’s attachment to a member of the same sex. Not so long ago, it was conceivable to suppose that two men might share an apartment merely as close friends; if Oscar and Felix of The Odd Couple did the same thing now, homosexuality would be the first thing to cross your mind, whether you support the homosexual agenda or reject it [...].

The effect upon boys is devastating; it is hard for women to understand it. Their own friendships come easily, and in general are not based upon shared conquest, physical or intellectual. It is simply an anthropological fact that male friendship is essential for the full development of the boy’s intellect: the history of every society reveals it. But now the boys suffer under a terrible pincers attack. The sexual revolution causes them to rouse themselves to interest, or to pretend to interest, in girls long before they or the girls are emotionally or intellectually ready for it; and now the condonement of homosexuality prevents them from publicly preferring the company of their own sex.

Flu besets badminton 'birdies'

As one who was introduced to the smashing game of Badminton in college --I took it twice for P.E. credit--I believe this to be important news.

Here's an excerpt:

Chinese geese have been destroyed by the millions to prevent the spread of the disease, and that has left a shortage of the fine feathers used to make shuttlecocks.
Only the thickest, heaviest goose feathers from northern China are used to make premium shuttlecocks and sometimes as few as two feathers per goose make the final cut.
But now, shuttlecock makers are having to settle for substandard feathers -- and that's leaving players a little ruffled.
The sport's devotees in Southern California say the latest projectiles -- also called birdies -- just aren't the same.

Marriage is a Kind of Death

I thought I would continue my posts on family/marriage. I found this article from Touchstone magazine today while perusing Park Cities Presbyterian's website. Peter Leithart from New St. Andrew's College in Moscow, ID wrote a wise and much needed article on marriage where he quotes Alexander Schmemann. The article's central theme is that marriage is a kind of death--but good death. Here's how Leithart closes out the article:

Nearly four decades ago, Alexander Schmemann argued that the problem with modern marriage "is not adultery or lack of ‘adjustment’ or ‘mental cruelty.’" Instead, he wrote, the problem is the "idolization of the family" that identifies "marriage with happiness" and refuses "to accept the cross in it." God’s presence as a "third party" in the marriage spells "the death of the marriage as something only ‘natural,’ and directs it to its true end of the kingdom of God.

In short, Schmemann continued, with characteristic elegance, the glory of marriage is "that of the martyr’s crown. For the way to the Kingdom is the matyria: bearing witness to Christ. And this means crucifixion and suffering. A marriage that does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not ‘die to itself’ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage."

What's a sign that your culture is nearing its twilight years?

Anthony Esolen over at Mere Comments has begun a series of entries to that blog defending traditional marriage, but his reasons for his defense, as he clarifies it, do not come from his religious convictions:

Most people believe that the principal objections, or even the only objections, to the drive to legalize homosexual “marriage” spring from religious faith. But that is simply not true. Beginning with this post I'll offer ten objections that have nothing to do with any religion at all, except insofar as the great religions of the world happen to reflect the nature of mankind. These objections spring from three sources.

Those three sources are the common sense observation of man, a consideration of history, and logic. He posts his first two objections today, which are 1) The legalization of homosexual “marriages” would enshrine the sexual revolution in law; and 2) [The legalization of homosexual marriage] would, in particular, enshrine in law the principle that sexual intercourse is a matter of personal fulfillment, with which the society has nothing to do.

Esolen teaches English at Providence College and his literary and erudite observations are needed in this fight against the dissolution of marriage and our culture. As Esolen says:

Some people reckon up the losses from this [sexual] revolution in terms of percentages: of unwed mothers, of aborted pregnancies, of children growing up without a parent, usually the father. It will take artists of the most penetrating insight to reckon up the losses as they ought to be reckoned, in human misery.

Pics from Anniversary Trip to Six Flags

Wife and I thought a trip to Six Flags would be a fun way to spend our anniversary time together. It proved to be true. Notice from the photo above that, in marriage, we have so completely become one that I have begun to sprout her arms as headwings.

Not everyone who rode The Conquistador had as much fun as we did.

Anniversary

Two years ago today, my wife and I were married. It's good and still getting better. Here's the poem that I asked a good friend of mine to read at our wedding. It's by Richard Wilbur.

Wedding Toast

St. John tells how, at Cana's wedding feast,
The water-pots poured wine in such amount
That by his sober count
There were a hundred gallons at the least.

It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow.

Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That this world's fullness is not made but found.
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you.

Now, if your loves will lend an ear to mine,
I toast you both, good son and dear new daughter.
May you not lack for water,
And may that water smack of Cana's wine.


Here's a bonus poem by Wilbur.

Having Misidentified A Wildflower

A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.

Dallas Diocese Joins Protest against New Episcopal Head

From Christian Post.com:

The Episcopal Diocese of Dallas on Wednesday joined a growing rejection of the church's newly elected bishop because she supports same-sex relationships.
Bishop James M. Stanton, the head of Dallas' diocese and its 40,000 members, wrote a letter asking Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams for a "direct pastoral relationship" from overseas instead of being under the American church and its new leader.

Hybrid Hondas, Hybrid Fords...Hybrid Hamburgers.

"I'll have the hybrid combo that's completely meatless and tastes like chicken, beef, pork or turkey and a Diet Coke. Thanks."

Texas Episcopal Megachurch to Leave Denomination

I have been occasionally following the problems in the Episcopal church in America. Christ Church in Plano (just north of where I am in Dallas) has decided to leave the Episcopal Church because of the recent election of Nevada Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as its first female presiding bishop. "Jefferts Schori supported the 2003 consecration of V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop. She also supported the creation of locally authorized blessings for gay unions." Read more here.

Western Conference Champs!

Pentecost

From The Daily Gospel:

Saint Anthony of Padua (around 1195 – 1231), Franciscan, Doctor of the Church.
"Sermons for Sundays and the Feasts of the Saints"

Tongues as of fire appeared.” Tongues – those of the serpent, of Eve and Adam, had given death access to this world… That is why the Spirit appeared in the form of tongues, opposing tongues with tongues, healing the fatal poison by means of fire… “They began to speak.” That is the sign of fullness; the full vessel overflows; the fire cannot contain itself… These diverse tongues are the various lessons that Christ left us, such as humility, poverty, patience, obedience. We speak in these various tongues when we give our neighbor an example of these virtues. The word is alive when the works speak. Let us make our works speak!

How 'Bout Them Mavs!

It feels like the Mavericks just won the entire championship with the way this series went. Go Mavs!

Dr. Gene Scott: Pastor, Scholar, Cigar Aficionado

(I am posting this mostly for the benefit of my wife who has never had the pleasure of viewing a Gene Scott television show.) Just thought I would post a little something on one of the true televangelists ever to grace a T.V. screen: Gene Scott. He's was a "pastoral teacher," scholar (with a Ph.D. in education), philanthropist, vineyard owner and lover of fine wines...well, you can read the rest here.

I'm not selling forty-pound Bibles, or water from Jordan, or 4,000 plastic crosses made by the Japanese and sold to Arabs. I don't send out 'healing cloths' or tear up my shirt. I say: what's what I've done worth? Whatever the meal I've fed you is worth, pay up. I'm not trying to save anybody. I think if you reject Christianity, you should do it intelligently.

-- Gene Scott (1929-2005)

Saddam Hussein: The Next Salman Rushdie?

Apparently Saddam has always had a penchant for writing novels. Seriously. This latest installment of his was supposedly written just before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. It has just been published in Japan. Those crazy Japanese. You can read about it here.

The Da Vinci Code secret is out: critics hate it

I haven't been a very vocal critic about The Da Vinci Code: not because I am a latent fan of Dan Brown's fiction but because I have not had time to read any of it. Nevertheless, I find this article from Reuters interesting. Da Vinci has apparently gone over like a lead balloon with some critics at Cannes. Here's an excerpt:

At a screening late on Tuesday in Cannes, members of the audience laughed at the thriller's pivotal moment, and the end of the $125 million picture was greeted with stony silence.

Here's another article with these comments:

Other critics said the two and a half hour film was confusing to those who hadn't read the book.
"People were confused, there was no applause, just silence," said Margherita Ferrandino from the Italian television Rai 3.
"I have only read half the book, and then I got bored. It's terrible," she added.
"It was really disappointing. The dialogue was cheesy. The acting wasn't too bad, but the film is not as good as the book," added Lina Hamchaoui, from British radio IRN.

Muslims and Catholics Together

Catholic Christians in India have threatened to stage a large protest at the premiere of The Da Vinci Code and consequently have forced a temporary halt on the opening of the film. Muslims have even joined in.

In India, complaints against the film forced the government on Tuesday to put a temporary hold on the release of “The Da Vinci Code,” in order to address concerns before the film is opened to the public. Prior to the decision, several Catholic groups threatened to stage street demonstrations and even to shut down cinema halls screening the film. Joining in the call on Monday was the All-India Sunni Jamiyat-ul-Ulema, a powerful organization of Indian Islamic clerics, which promised to help Christian groups launch protests if the authorities did not ban the screening of the film. The clerics said "The Da Vinci Code" is blasphemous as it spreads lies about Jesus, who the Koran recognizes as a prophet.

You can read the rest here.

Bible literalism 'pagan superstition'?

Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno says believing God created the universe in six days is a form of "pagan superstition."

Consolmagno told the Scotsman the idea that religion and science are competing principles is a "destructive myth."

Read the rest here.

Love and Marriage

I found this great quotation that Anthony Esolen posted at the Mere Comments blog on April 29. It's from Sir Philip Sydney: I know him for a work called A Defense of Poetry. I also know of him because C.S. Lewis was well acquainted with his work. The quotation is below, and you can read Esolen's musings on it here.

"A happy couple: he joying in her, she joying in herself, but in herself, because she enjoyed him: both increasing their riches by giving to each other; each making one life double, because they made a double life one; where desire never wanted satisfaction, nor satisfaction ever bred satiety: he ruling, because she would obey, or rather because she would obey, she therein ruling." From Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia (1593).

T.V.

I have an ambivalent attitude toward TV. I watched TONS of it as a kid and read little. My wife was just the opposite: she looks at me as though I'm speaking a foreign language when I begin to reminisce about my TV viewing in the '80's. At times, I hate the TV--with all its commercials and mind-numbing flickering--but then, at other times, despite the flaws it possesses as a medium, there are some things I really enjoy watching. Here's a cleverly written and insightful article expressing some of these very same sentiments. In fact, here's as snippet:

Of course, TV has always been mostly awful. “Boob tube” did not begin as an anatomical observation. The myth persists of a Golden Age of Television in the 1950s, but the blurry surviving kinescoped evidence yields a baser metal. Way back in May 1961, Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called TV “a vast wasteland.” Well, the landscape is a lot vaster 44 years later, and still wasted, but how could it not be? TV never stops any more; there’s just too much of it. In the late 1940s, a station played “The Star Spangled Banner” by 10 p.m. and signed off for the night. The citizenry rested—or read or did their bit for the baby boom. There’s not enough talent even in today’s fame-crazed United States to keep TV interesting all the time. Remember: Most books are not worth reading either. And not every play took a prize in old Athens; the relatively few that survive by no means represent the lot that did not.

And I had to include this one just because he mentions one of my favorite shows, King of the Hill...

King of the Hill dates from 1997, but it’s never had the breakout success it deserves, which may be a good thing. Fame hasn’t gone to its head, as happened with The Simpsons. (Fox routinely sacrifices Hill on Sunday evenings to the gods of interminable football games.) The series has stayed steadily on track and low-key hilarious, at once a send-up and an affirmation of red-state America values. The Hill family of Arlen, Texas, may shop at the big-box Mega-Lo Mart, but they’re TV royalty: levelheaded patriarch Hank (the anti-Homer Simpson), purveyor of propane and propane accessories; his wife, Peggy, a substitute high school teacher, sometimes of Spanish, who has to wing it after hola; and their ample, affable, and fitfully adolescent 13-year-old son, Bobby, of Tom Landry Middle School. Good people all, who deserve a more compliant world.

Christianity and the Arts

I have been leading a class at my church through C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. I found this short article called "TheImportance of the Arts to Christianity" by Louis Markos. It's very insightful. Markos is a Lewisian, and I found it here. Here it is:

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ARTS TO CHRISTIANITY

by Louis Markos, Houston Baptist University

1. Through a proper use of the arts, we must heal the enlightenment split between religion and science, art and technology, values and facts, myth and history, fiction and fact, emotional and rational, intuition and logic, revelation and reason, secular and sacred, poetry and doctrine. We need a re-synthesis, one that will allow us to worship God with our minds and hearts. We need to use the arts to heal what T. S. Eliot called “the dissociation of sensibility” that set in c. 1800. A proper use of the arts may even help us to re-integrate the modern Christian divide between a too-rigid focus on systematic theology and an overly-emotional emphasis on spiritual gifts.

2. We need the arts to make Christian theology come real. Art comes closer than systematic theology at expressing and capturing the mystery inherent in the Trinity. Art, in bringing together the abstract and the particular, the universal and the concrete points to the Incarnation—the central belief that Jesus was FULLY Man and FULLY God. We can learn from the Eastern Orthodox focus on icons as proclaimers of the Word made Flesh. The Incarnation baptized physical matter as a fit receptacle for divine meaning and presence. We need not be iconoclasts or fear representations of holy subjects (as do the Muslims and as did the Jews)

3. The producing, absorbing, and interpreting of the arts exercises the mind to under-stand the many levels of meaning in Scripture. Augustine and Aquinas both felt that God purposely made the Bible difficult so that we would have to wrestle with it (Bible is not stream-lined, not all slick packaging). A full wrestling with the arts and the stories that underlie them helps us to perceive and to engage sacred history. It helps us to see and understand that God works THROUGH history; Bible is mostly told from man’s perspective. (Dream of the Giant; Dante forces us to learn history.)

4. We must be salt and light in the world; we must engage our culture through the arts. The arts speak to people on a deep level; they form people’s opinions and attitudes in a way that is often not seen. The battle is often won through images, for it is around images that people often hang their beliefs and goals. The influence of rap, heavy metal and MTV is far more harmful than anyone gives it credit for.

5. The arts are vital to the artist, for we MUST use our gifts (Matt 25). Even if no one reads/hears our work, through the very fact that we produced it, we praise God. We must strive for excellence—not just be good enough to sing on Sunday morning.

6. The arts help us to perceive and/or build connections everywhere. By so doing, they allow us: a) to rebuild the sympathetic universe that the medievals saw and that Dante embodied most fully; 2) to see that Christ fulfills not only the Jewish Law/Prophets but all the deepest philosophical, theological, and aesthetic yearnings of mankind; 3) to be better evangelists and apologists through an ability to re-incarnate the Gospel in a variety of different cultures; 4) to praise God through a symphony of voices.

Louis Markos, Houston Baptist Univ., lmarkos@hbu.edu,

http://fc.hbu.edu/~lmarkos

Another from The Daily Gospel

The early church doctors' and fathers' poetic understanding of Scripture and salvation history is beautiful:

Commentary of the day : Saint Peter Chrysologus (around 406 – 450), Bishop of Ravenna, Doctor of the Church Sermon 81

“Jesus came and stood before them. ‘Peace be with you.’”

Rebellious people had chased peace from the earth… and thrown the world into its primordial chaos… Among the disciples as well, war was waging; faith and doubt fought furious assaults on one another… Where a storm was raging, their hearts could find no peaceful harbor, no calm port. At the sight of that, Christ, who plumbs the hearts, who commands the winds, who is master over the tempests and who with a simple sign changes the storm into a serene sky, strengthened them with his peace, saying: “Peace be with you! It is I; fear not. It is I who was crucified, who was dead, who was buried. It is I, your God become man for you. It is I. Not a spirit clothed with a body, but truth itself become man. It is I, the living one among the dead, who have come from heaven to the heart of hell. It is I before whom death fled, whom hell feared. In its terror, hell proclaimed me to be God. Do not be afraid, Peter, you who denied me, nor you, John, who fled, nor all of you who abandoned me, who thought of nothing but betraying me, who do not yet believe in me, even though you see me. Do not be afraid, it really is I. I have called you with grace, I have chosen you with forgiveness, I have upheld you with my compassion, I have carried you in my love, and I am taking you today solely because of my kindness.”

Deconstructing Lewis Part 3

I'm having to backtrack a bit on the last post. I've come to a better understanding of Kathryn Lindskoog (now deceased) and her position in the wars between her and the estate of C.S. Lewis, with its literary advisor, Walter Hooper. This article explains the whole thing. While I still have my doubts about Hooper, I have come to understand Lindskoog a little better. Her zeal for Lewis and his works was admirable, but it seems that it often led her to hasty judgments and conclusions.

Deconstructing Lewis Part 2

Last week, I had a beef with Adam Gopnik's critique of Alan Jacob's The Narnian, which was published in the The New Yorker a few months ago. Gopnik relies heavily on A.N. Wilson's biography of Lewis. The picture Wilson paints of Lewis lack credibility: just read this article by Kathryn Lindskoog where she not only highlights Wilson's numerous factual errors but also reveals the agenda that is at back of those errors.

Good Friday

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing--or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God--the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves. -- C.S. Lewis

George Herbert's "The Sacrifice"

Anthony Esolen posted this today at the Mere Comments blog. It's a very good poem and by the author who wrote the poem from which the name of this blog comes.

....My cross I bear myself, until I faint:
Then Simon bears it for me by constraint,
The decreed burden of each mortal Saint:
Was ever grief like mine?

O all ye who pass by, behold and see:
Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;
The tree of life to all, but only me:
Was ever grief like mine?....

Lo, here I hang, charged with a world of sin,
The greater world o' th' two; for that came in
By words, but this by sorrow I must win:
Was ever grief like mine?....

But, O my God, my God! why leav'st thou me,
The son, in whom thou dost delight to be?
My God, my God ----
Never was grief like mine.

From George Herbert, "The Sacrifice" (1633)

Maundy Thursday: The Institution of the Eucharist

This is an appropriate quotation from C.S. Lewis for today, Maundy Thursday:

"I do not know and can't imagine what the disciples understood Our Lord to mean when, His body still unbroken and His blood unshed, He handed them the bread and wine, saying they were His body and blood...I find no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds [heaven and earth], nowhere else (for me) opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable to divine operation. Here a hand in the hidden country touches not ony my soul but my body. Here the prig, the don, the modern, in me have no privilege over the savage or the child...The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand. Particularly, I hope I need not be tormented by the question 'What is this?'--this wafer, this sip of wine. That has a dreadful effect on me. It invites me to take 'this' out of its holy context and regard it as an object among objects, indeed as part of nature. It is like taking a red coal out of the fire to examine it: it becomes a dead coal." (from Letters to Malcolm, Ch.19)

See the previous post (below) for another good meditation for today in the church calendar.

Maundy Thursday: Love One Another As I Have Loved You

Here's a wonderful meditation from Guerric of Igny (around 1080 – 1157), Cistercian abbot. 1st Sermon for Palm Sunday from www.dailygospel.org

“He had loved his own in this world, and would show his love for them to the end.”“Your attitude must be that of Christ.” … “He was in the form of God,” equal to God by nature, since he shared in God’s power, God’s eternity and God’s very being… He did the job of a servant “by humbling himself, obeying his Father even to death, death on a cross.” (cf. Phil 2:5-8) One might consider it to be trivial that, as God’s Son and his equal, he served his Father as a servant. More than that, he served his own servant more than any other servant. For the human being had been created to serve his Creator. What could be more just for you than to serve him who made you, without whom you would not be? And what could be more blest than to serve him, since to serve him is to reign? But the human being said to his Creator: “I will not serve.” (Jer 2:20)Then the Creator said to the human being: “So I will serve you! Go sit down at the table; I will serve. I will wash your feet. Rest. I will take your pains upon myself; I will carry your weakness… If you grow tired or are burdened, I will carry you, you and your burden, so as to be the first to fulfill my law: ‘Carry one another’s burdens’ (Gal 6:2)… If you are hungry or thirsty…, here I am, ready to be sacrificed so that you might eat my flesh and drink my blood… If you are taken into captivity or if you are sold, here I am… Redeem yourself by paying the ransom you will get from me. I give myself as ransom… If you are sick, if you fear death, I will die in your place, so that from my blood you can make for yourself a life-giving remedy…”O my Lord, what a price you paid to ransom my useless service!… What a way you had, full of love, of gentleness and of kindness, to win back and submit this rebellious servant by triumphing over evil through good, by confounding my pride with your humility, by filling this ungrateful person with your kindness! This! This is how your wisdom triumphed.

Deconstructing Lewis?

This is old news, but I think it's worth bringing up...I just found this review of Alan Jacob's book The Narnian, which came out just before the movie this past Christmas. This review is by New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik. I found his review to be a poor piece of journalism. I say this not because of the dirt he uncovers on Lewis (Lewis doesn't hide his dirt, and what he does hide is out of a sense of propriety), which comes from A.N. Wilson's biography of Lewis' life (one that relies on the "hermeneutic of suspicion"). I say this because Gopnik's write up is dripping with a preunderstanding of Lewis that is reactive to Lewis' reception in America by conservative Christians. It's so reactive that it gets the most basic of details wrong. Consequently, his review is so biased with a desire to deconstruct Lewis that it fails to offer a fair reading.

Here's an example:

Converted to faith as the means of joy, however, Lewis never stops to ask very hard why this faith rather than some other. His favorite argument for the truth of Christianity is that either Jesus had to be crazy to say the things he did or what he said must be true, and since he doesn’t sound like someone who is crazy, he must be right.

Compare this to a letter from Lewis to Sheldon Vanauken published in Vanauken's book A Severe Mercy (pp.89-90). This is a long quotation but worth reading:

What you really start with [in the history of religion] is ritual, myth, and mystery, the death and return of Balder or Osiris, the dances, the initiations, the sacrifices, the divine kings. Over against that are the Philosophers, Aristotle or Confucius, hardly religious at all. The only two systems in which the mysteries and the philosophies come together are Hinduism and Christianity: there you get both Metaphysics and cult...That is why my first step was to be sure that one or the other of these [Hinduism or Christianity] had the answer. For the reality can't be one that appeals either only to savages or only to high brows. Real things aren't like that (e.g. matter is the first most obvious thing you meet--milk, chocolates, apples, and also the object of quantum physics). There is no question of just a crowd of disconnected religions. The choice is between (a.) The materialist world picture: wh. I can't believe (b.) The real archaic primitive religions: wh. are not moral enough (c.) The (claimed) fulfillment of these in Hinduism (d.) The claimed fulfillment of these in Christianity. But the weakness of Hinduism is that it doesn't really join the two strands...It is only Christianity wh. compels a high brow like me to partake in a ritual blood feast, and also compels a central African convert to attempt an enlightened universal code of ethics.

How one can say that Lewis really did not think through the "Liar, Lunatic or Lord" argument and can imply that he used it as a catchy word device to sum up his faith is beyond me. Moreover, Lewis did, in fact, look into Hinduism before converting to the Church (as the quotation above implies).

I am not for enshrining Lewis in the stain glass of churches--and undoubtedly, Lewis would not have wanted anything like this either--but at least give him a fair reading and be more careful in your journalism, Mr. Gopnik.

Collect for Wednesday

This is the collect* for Wednesday of Holy Week taken from the Book of Common Prayer:

O Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his back to the smiters and hid not his face from shame: Grant us grace to take joyfully the sufferings of the present time, in full assurance of the glory that shall be revealed; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

* Collect: From the Latin word collecta, meaning "assembly." The word is normally used to refer to the prayer near the beginning of the Eucharist that precedes the lessons. The collect was supposedly designed to "collect" the thoughts of the lessons and bind the thoughts together, back in the days when only one lesson and a Gospel were read. A collect is actually any short prayer that contains an invocation, a petition, and a pleading in Christ's Name (in that order).
(You can find more Episcopalian/Anglican terms at http://www.holycross.net/anonline.htm)

Poetry Exercise

"The Hound"

Life the hound
Equivocal
Comes at a bound
Either to rend me
Or to befriend me.

I cannot tell
The hound's intent
Till he has sprung
At my bare hand
With teeth or tongue.
Meanwhile I stand
And wait the event.

--Robert Francis (1901-1987)

What does this poem mean? Post you comments and we'll see what happens.

St. Peter and Language

I started receiving this email called The Daily Gospel. It's quite good. It always has a commentary from an early church writer, father, doctor, etc. included at the end.
The gospel reading for today is from John 13.21-38. Can't we all identify with Peter?

Commentary of the day : Saint Maxim of Turin (? – around 420), Bishop CC Sermon 76, 317

“The cock will not crow before you have three times disowned me.Turning around, the Lord looked at Peter. And Peter, become aware of what he had just said, he repented and wept…; he broke into tears and remained mute… (cf. Lk 22:61-62). Words can not be successful in expressing a prayer, and they can never succeed in expressing tears. Tears always express what we are feeling, but words can be powerless. That is why Peter did not have recourse to words. Words had pushed him to betray, to sin, to deny his faith. He preferred admitting his sin by means of tears, since he had denied through words…Let us imitate him in what he said elsewhere, when the Lord asked him three times: “Simon, do you love me?” (Jn 21:17) Three times he answered: “Lord, you know that I love you.” Then the Lord said to him: “Feed my sheep,” and he said it three times. That word made up for his previous aberration. The one who had denied the Lord three times, confessed him three times; he had become guilty three times, three times he obtained grace through his love. See therefore what benefit Peter drew from his tears!… Before shedding tears, he was a traitor; once he had shed tears, he was chosen as pastor, and he who had behaved badly received the responsibility to lead the others.

In Case You Thought the Days of Heavy Metal Christian Glamrock Were Over...

Stryper's been making a comeback (perhaps this is really old news but it's new to me)...

Is that Oz Fox second from right? or on the right?

Please read about their history here. Seriously, please do.

Lazarus Saturday

Here's a good meditation on Lazarus Saturday (the day before Palm Sunday--I just discovered that it was called this, at least in the Orthodox calendar). It's by James Kushiner of Touchstone Magazine. Here's an excerpt:

One of my most memorable Lents was spent reading Crime and Punishment, so the crime theme was close at hand. What brings me back to that Lent, which was perhaps five years ago, is reading today [two days ago] from the Lenten Triodion of the Orthodox Church. I am reading verses for Lazarus Saturday, which falls next Saturday and marks the place where Lent ends and Holy Week begins.

Of course in the Western calendar today is the day before Palm Sunday, and readings from John 11 on the raising of Lazarus make sense. According to John, Jesus' return to Bethany and the raising of Lazarus marks the beginning of his passion sequence. When the leaders saw how the crowds, who were arriving in Jerusalem for the Passover, responded to the news of Lazarus's resurrection, they knew trouble was brewing. Next thing you know they might hail Jesus as Messiah, which, of course they did on Palm Sunday.

Crime and Punishment, of course, brings the raising of Lazarus quietly into the novel as it unfolds in the redemption of the hopeless murderer Raskolnikov. I cannot approach Lazarus Saturday without thinking of the redemption of that wretched man.

Another about Darfur

For those who took interest in the last entry about Dafur, here's another link that I meant to include. It is a blog that has up-to-date info on what is happening there. I just found it very informative--especially since network news fails to see the situation as newsworthy.

Darfur and You

I was just talking with my wife today about the news--network news, mostly--and how, when it gets down to it, whether you lean toward FOXNews or CNN, you have to use discernment in your news viewing. It's all edited and decided upon for you. If you are not familiar with what has been happening in the Darfur region of Sudan, it might just be because the networks choose to make news out of other events. Please see this website for information on Darfur and the genocide happening there, and if you've followed the Sudan crisis at all, you can send an email to the major news networks letting them know of your concern for their poozely (a word my wife uses sometimes meaning something like another down home term, puny) news coverage. Also please note, once you visit the website, how much more newsworthy Michael Jackson is compared to thousands of slaughtered Africans.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann on Easter

St. Paul says: "If Christ is not risen, then your faith is in vain." There is nothing else to believe. This is the real center, and it is only in reference to Easter as the end of all natural time and the beginning of the new time in which we as Christians have to live that we can understand the whole liturgical year. If you open a calendar, you will find all our Sundays are called Sundays after Pentecost, and Pentecost itself is fifty days after Easter. Pentecost is the fulfillment of Easter. Christ ascended into heaven and sent down His Holy Spirit. When He sent down His Holy Spirit into the world, a new society was instituted, a body of people, whose life, though it remained of this world and was shared in its life, took on a new meaning. This new meaning comes directly from Christ’s Resurrection. We are no longer people who are living in time as in a meaningless process, which makes us first old and then ends in our disappearance. We are given not only a new meaning in life, but even death itself has acquired a new significance. In the Troparion at Easter we say, "He trampled down death by death." We do not say that He trampled down death by the Resurrection, but by death.

A Christian still faces death as a decomposition of the body, as an end; yet in Christ, in the Church, because of Easter, because of Pentecost, death is no longer just the end but it is the beginning also. It is not something meaningless which therefore gives a meaningless taste to all of life. Death means entering into the Easter of the Lord. This is the basic tone, the basic melody of the liturgical year of the Christian Church. Christianity is, first of all, the proclamation in this world of Christ’s Resurrection. Orthodox spirituality is paschal in its inner content, and the real content of the Church life is joy. We speak of feasts; the feast is the expression of joyfulness of Christianity.

Fr. Schmemann was an Russian Orthodox theologian who lived in the U.S. You can find out more about Fr. Alexander Schmemann here and here (this links to an obituary).

Russian patriarch communicates with pope

Here's a link to the World Magazine article of the same title.

Another Sayers Quotation About Work

Here's another quotation from Dorothy Sayers from the same essay mentioned in the previous entry. If you are not familiar with Sayers, here is a link to the Dorothy L. Sayers Society's brief bio about her. This quotation illuminates the need for workers who serve their work rather than the community and reveals the confusion of means and ends when the aim of the worker is merely serving the community with their work. This is a long one but well worth your time.

[The] worker's first duty is to serve the work. The popular catchphrase of today [this was 1942 but still very relevant today] is that it is everybody's duty to serve the community. It is a well-sounding phrase, but there is a catch in it. It is the old catch about the two great commandments. "Love God--and your neighbor; on those two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."

The catch in it, which nowadays the world has largely forgotten, is that the second commandment depends upon the first, and that without the first, it is a delusion and a snare. Much of our present trouble and disillusionment have come from putting the second commandment before the first.

If we put our neighbor first, we are putting man above God, and that is what we have been doing ever since we began to worship humanity and make man the measure of all things...."Service" is the motto of the advertiser, of big business, and of fraudulent finance. And of others, too. Listen to this: "I expect the judiciary to understand that the nation does not exist for their convenience, but that justice exists to serve the nation." That was Hitler yesterday--and that is what becomes of "service," when the community, and not the work, becomes the idol. There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work....

The only way of serving the community is to be truly in sympathy with the community, to be oneself part of the community, and then to serve the work, without giving the community another thought. Then the work will endure, because it will be true to itself. It is the work that serves the community; the business of the worker is to serve the work (pp.111-114).

Ms. Sayers' thoughts here have widespread implications for the arts, economics, and any other vocation fitting for a person to enter.

Dorothy Sayers on Work

I am doing some reading on work and leisure. Here is a great quotation from Dorothy Sayers from her essay "Why Work?" found her book in Creed or Chaos?:

The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of work done. To do so would mean taking the attitude of mind we reserve for our unpaid work--our hobbies, our leisure interests, the things we make and do for pleasure--and making that the standard of all our judgments about things and people. We should ask of an enterprise, not "will it pay?" but "is it good?''; of a man, not "what does he make?" but "what is his work worth?"; of goods, not "can we induce people to buy them? but "are they useful things well made?"; of employment, not "how much a week?" but "will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?" And shareholders in--let us say--brewing companies, would astonish the directorate by arising at shareholders' meetings and demanding to know, not merely where the profits go or what dividends are to be paid, not even merely whether workers' wages are sufficient and the conditions of labor satisfactory, but loudly and with a proper sense of personal responsibility" "What goes into the beer?" (pp. 98-99).

The Sisters Karamazov

Should all stories have happy endings--or the endings we, as the readers, would like? This article provides an enjoyable analysis of this issue.

Differences between Protestants and Catholics Likened Unto Those Between Plato and Aristotle

"When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being much too like the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics." -- C.S. Lewis from his The Allegory of Love, ch. 7, section 3. Also found in A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C.S. Lewis, p. 128-29, edited by Clyde S. Kilby.

Chiming in on the Anti-Crash Sentiments

DISCLAIMER: You may want to only read my "two cents worth" version and skip the rest of this. I wrote this trying to work out what the movie Crash lacked as a story. So if you want, here's my two cents worth and you can dismiss what you see below and go about your day pursuing more profitable ends: Read William Faulkner's Light in August and then see Crash (if you haven't seen it already). Faulkner's masterpiece deals with the same sociological themes but does it more masterfully and carefully.

Here's the long version:

This is a little late, but nevertheless...Crash should not have won the Oscar for best picture. The characters are flat: they're more like caricatures rather than characters. There's no action in the story. If there is, what is it? Racial tensions and bigotry? Social issues cannot carry a story. They can be part of the story--part of the characters' surroundings and can even and should contribute the story's momentum--but they cannot be the central thrust of the entire work. Something more fundamental that fuels such cultural issues must be central to make a story. Good stories grant one a sense of pleasure--even tragedies. Crash does not do this. This is why Crash--well--crashes. The poet--or director--should help us see something about reality. Crash tells me reality is simplistic and that everything works out in the end--like a 50 minute T.V. drama. The reality he is dealing is far too horizontal to be interesting: the concern for racial tensions in our culture (which is, of course, a proper and justified concern) is presented in purely sociological terms. That is why the film smacks of science and not story--the sociological outweighs dramatic action--observational realities outweigh transcendent ones. Consequently, the plot is trite and reminiscent of Grand Canyon--minus the in-your-face, predominant theme of race. Various lives come together in modern day Los Angeles and something happens. The plot is tired and old--not Grand Canyon's but Crash's. I am not the first to complain about this: I've heard it from various sources on the web.

Whoever wrote Crash could have helped his storytelling by first referring to Faulkner's Light in August. Various lives are thrown together in a small Mississippi town and something happens: and what happens reveals something not merely about race relations in 1930's Mississippi but essentially about man (his greatness, his limits, his moral defects), love, and sacrifice. These fundamental themes are at the root of dramatic problems--or, conflict. I guess that's it: Faulkner understood good stories as representing "the heart in conflict with itself." Crash has conflict, but it lacks dramatic conflict--it lacks the kind of conflict that makes you think about universals.

All I thought about after viewing Crash was the last scene: two people of different racial backgrounds are involved in a fender-bender and they each blame, and make racially-charged derogative comments at, the other. Just before this, one of the main African-American characters has just released a load of illegal Chinese immigrants from a van he has stolen. This is to be understood a good deed done by this character played by rapper Ludacris. So what's the juxtaposition of these two incidents mean? Well, I am afraid it is supposed to go something like this: "There are some advances being made out there in race relations, but then, you know, there's still a long way to go." Okay, yes, this is true in American society, but I could have gotten this moral lesson from a news story or a documentary. Art and story are supposed to show you something that you could not have seen through any other medium (this is not original to me but is from Flannery O'Connor). If drama and story are supposed to be more philosophical than history (or sociology), then we should see universals emerging through their respective forms. This emergence, however, is subtle and requires something of its audience. Some may balk at this notion, but this is what makes art so appealing. It's not math or science: one can't merely plug a formula in and see a result and then assume that he has found his answer. Art and story are more like life--there's ambiguity and consequent moral responsibility placed upon a character (and the reader or viewer!) to make particular choices about particular things. This is where drama is created, and I felt like the characters of Crash were not forced into difficult choices: it was apparent what each character was there to do in the movie. They made the choices I expected each of them to make, and there was conflict between people but little conflict was revealed as going on within people--struggles that would imply the conflict within oneself to make a choice.

The moral of this story? Read Light in August then see Crash.