Sunday, March 19, 2006

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.

Saturday, March 18, 2006

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).

Monday, March 13, 2006

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.

Saturday, March 11, 2006

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.

Thursday, March 09, 2006

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.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Johnny Cash Recordings Set for Release in May

When Johnny Cash began his American Recordings with Rick Rubin in 1993, he was told that it would be a project in which he could record his songs simply--just his voice and his guitar. This is something he always wanted to do. In the early 70's, he had recorded some of the songs he knew as a boy, stories, etc. at his home in Hendersonville, TN. His son, John Carter Cash, seems to think that he shopped these to his label at the time, Columbia, to be produced, but Columbia wasn't interested. Apparently, these recordings are now set to be produced and sold beginning May 2006. The recordings will be called Personal File. If you're interested in more you can read about it here.

Consumers or Citizens? Common Preference or Common Good?


This article is a helpful and sobering reminder about technology--especially internet technology. Here's a couple of insightful quotations. In the emerging "technoculture," as Reed Johnson (the article's author) calls it, the idea of man as consumer tends to matter more than the idea of man as citizen. Many of the technologies of this emerging culture are internet related. Johnson emphasizes that new internet search technologies might lead to nothing more than the mere consumption of what one already knows and prefers (which is quite anti-liberal in the truest sense of the word liberal) and thereby leave little room for the common good in the conscience of the individual:

"The tailoring one's universes to one's tastes creates a sort of self-imposed ghetto of tastes," says Albert Borgmann, a philosophy professor at the University of Montana who has written extensively about technology's social effects. "It can put you in touch with lots of people, but they're all your kind of people."

Its champions love to compare the Web's advent to the invention of the printing press. But what made Gutenberg's machine revolutionary was as much about what he printed — the Bible — as how he printed it. If he had published a list of his favorite songs or anguished confessions about his breakup with his girlfriend, he and his remarkable machine might not have had quite the same cultural impact. Americans tend to embrace new technology easily — cars, television sets, the atom bomb — and postpone reckoning with the costs until decades later. Smart search engines and personal networking software are highly useful but, in and of themselves, politically and morally neutral.

AND

The late social critic Christopher Lasch, author of "The Culture of Narcissism," took a darker view of whether market-based consumer empowerment can enhance citizen empowerment."When half the eligible voters do not even bother to vote," Lasch wrote in a prescient 1981 essay, "students of public opinion — journalists and academics alike — turn to 'culture' as the only field in which individual preferences still seem to matter. By redirecting their attention from public policy to consumer tastes, however, they unavoidably help to sustain the illusion that people can initiate sweeping changes without resorting to politics, merely by exercising their right to make individual decisions as consumers of goods, services and ideologies."

I have not read Christopher Lasch, but I would like to. I have heard a few scholars who know his writings well talk about his thought and views of more recent forms of American democracy.

As Johnson says, search engines and personal networking software (or devices i.e. blogs), which are replacing the need for broadcasted news and information, are neutral. They don't necessarily lead to change--or good change at least. They may merely allow for the creation of sectarian tribes, each filled with persons interested in a certain common thing, who join forces for no other reason than to discuss the thing they're really interested in. Consequently, the old understanding of civilized man as a citizen of a corporate body set on furthering the common good is replaced by the understanding (which is really more like an assumption) of man as a consumer joined together with other consumers by their common preference--and then there's another group of consumers with their common interest, and another, and another, and so on. This sounds less like a society governed by the rule of law and concerned with liberal democracy and more like tribalism.

There's much to be gleaned in this article, and I would like to get a better grasp on the crucial details involved with this issue.

Monday, March 06, 2006

Thomas Kinkade: Angel of Light

This post is especially for my wife. She has questions about Kinkade's art (as we all should). I'm convinced that Kinkade is delusional. This article from the LA Times proves it. If you read it, pay careful attention to his justification of public urination and the comments by adoring fans claiming that he is a contemporary Leonardo da Vinci, etc. In fact, here's just a sample. When Kinkade was acccused of acting inappropriately toward another woman at one of his signing parties, he had this to say:

"But you've got to remember," he said, "I'm the idol to these women who are there. They sell my work every day, you know. They're enamored with any attention I would give them. I don't know what kind of flirting they were trying to do with me. I don't recall what was going on that night."

I am not intending to smear Kinkade's name but something must be said. Who says things like the quotation above? This man should be exposed for what he is and held accountable not only for mocking the Church and the name of Christ but for his megalomania and lame, unimaginative art!

Saturday, March 04, 2006

40 Million Frustrated Bachelors by 2020

You really should check out Arts and Letters Daily (see the link to the left). A prof at UD first introduced me to it a couple of years ago. There are links to all kinds of good articles written on a wide range of topics from politics to literature.

This article is unsettling. What happens when a society, with a policy of only one child per family and a penchant for boys, is introduced to ultrasound technology? This is what countries in Asia are dealing with now--20 years after the introduction of the ultrasound. There aren't enough women for all the twenty-something bachelors and things have been looking pretty grim. The article points to the implications this has not only for Chinese society, for instance, but also on its relationships with other countries.

Should the West Apologize for Dante? Shakespeare?

I found this article at Arts and Letters Daily re: free speech and the traditions of the West in light of the Danish cartoon brouhaha. It's an provocative piece written by a man originally from Pakistan and trained in Koran schools. In fact. here's Ibn Warraq's (a pseudonym "traditionally used by dissidents in Islam") bio:

Born in 1946 in India and raised in Pakistan, Ibn Warraq was educated in Koran schools in Pakistan and later in England. He currently lives in the United States and writes under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq, a pen name traditionally used by dissidents in Islam. He is the author of the best- seller "Why I am Not a Muslim" and the editor of "The Origins of the Koran" and "The Quest for the Historical Muhammad."

I am mostly intrigued by a Pakistani defending Western culture.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Scot McKnight on the Emergent Movement (EM)

I've found a judicious and informational article on the Emergent church by North Park (not in Dallas but Chicago) Seminary prof Scot McKnight. He does a good job of highlighting the EM's (Emergent movement--I've found out it's not "EC"--Emergent church) admirable qualities, while also presenting some items for concern. From McKnight's evaluation, I realize it is not only EM's "chronological snobbery" and the fact that they mainly attract young, white, middle class folk (though the "movement" has spread to Asia, etc.), but also their refusal of dogma, or defined statements of faith. They claim to hold to the early church, ecumenical creeds but nothing else (from what I understand). But, as McKnight points out, creedal statements of belief have been a part of the church since the beginning when the Shema of the Old Testament was naturally incorporated into worship.

Lent, Protestant Evangelicals, and Time

Here is a quotation from D.H. Williams, an ordained Baptist pastor who taught for many years at The University of Chicago (Catholic), regarding Tradition/Church history and the Holy Spirit:

"It is time for Protestant evangelicals to reconsider much more seriously the work of the Holy Spirit in the whole history of the church. This will mean that we will understand the ministry of the Spirit not as a privately emerging force in individuals as much as the primary Actor in the church's actus tradendi, the living transmission and acceptance of the apostolic message in the body of Christ. It is through this corporate and 'horizontal' process that our individual ('vertical') encounter with the Holy Spirit is shaped and nurtured. Following the way of discipleship cannot function as Christian discipleship in isolation from the guidance which the Spirit has provided through Spirit-led men and women in the church's past. A dizzying array of options are available for anyone who seeks privatized or small group spirituality, and some of these closely mimic Christianity. But only through Scripture and the consensual Tradition will the believer be enabled to find spiritual living that is within the shelter of the orthodox faith of the church" (from Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants, pp. 69-70, boldtype mine).

I am including this quotation in today's post because, of course, today is the beginning of the Lenten season. And historically, Protestants, being those who tend toward suspicion when it comes to tradition, often make little of seasons like Lent--seeing them as vestiges of a Catholic-dominated past from which we wish to escape. But we were created in time (see Gen. 1--"seasons" come before the creation of man) and seasons are helpful to us. We, however, live in a culture that attempts (largely due to consumeristic agendas, etc.) to smear the distinctions between times and seasons (24hr. businesses, and so on). Nevertheless, we cannot escape our creaturehood, and it seems to me that the more we attempt to live apart from creation and reject the undulation of time and the necessity of seasons, the worse off we are.

Here's a link to a helpful guide for Lent from Christ Church (Episcopal) in Plano, TX.