Actual Gadfly

Tuesday, May 06, 2008 In a Books & Culture review of a book on Bill Bright, Stephen H. Webb makes a characteristically insightful observation:

The campus radicals failed in their bid to take over the universities, but they went on to dominate them as professors. They also went on to dominate our collective understanding of the Sixties, but their scholarship systematically overlooks student movements that do not fit their narrow understanding of social activism. Liberal professors have exhaustively examined Woodstock as much as they studiously neglected "Explo '72" (short for "spiritual explosion"), but the 85,000 college and high school students who gathered in Dallas to listen to Christian rock and learn how to witness to their faith went on to impact their universities as much or more than the crowds who partied on Max Yasgur's farm. Likewise, precious few university history courses would ever acknowledge that the "Four Spiritual Laws" have had a cultural impact completely disproportionate to the much acclaimed 1962 Port Huron Statement by Students for a Democratic Society.

Such thoughts are expanded upon in an address, posted today, that Webb gave to incoming students at Wabash College. Webb diagnoses contemporary academia from a Christian perspective (in short: human nature exists, and whatever it is, Christ has it). Webb then gives advice to incoming students on how to engage the strange creatures that haunt much of academe: Humans who eschew human nature.

Most of my colleagues in academia with no religious commitment might, on a good day, read the analysis and respond: Now there's a gadfly, that is, someone who is truly challenging my presuppositions. What good is the lauded Socratic gadfly if it doesn't actually annoy you? Now here, I can imagine them possibly saying, is a colleague who would make for interesting conversation. Here, might they muse, is the "other." Perhaps such were the thoughts that went through the mind of the Wabash committee that tenured Webb. Perhaps Webb's success also owes something to a wide dissatisfaction with the multicultural stalemate he describes.

Some Christian responses to Webb's address would, I imagine, be much more troubling. Webb's rhetoric will, I assure you, make the sophistichristians deeply nervous. It's not really that bad (say those who have spent most of their time in Christian circles). The ideas Webb decries are in fact helpful (say those who use them as surgical tools to perform doctrinal lobotomies). We need to engage more (say those who enjoy little actual engagement with secular colleagues). No, folks, this is engagement, and it can (must!) be done with a smile, not a scowl.

Webb might have also pointed out that if one is genuinely interested in multiculturalism, the Christian faith has a decent track record on that front. Many failures have there been, but these despite, not because of the charter. "Christ against the multiculturalists" may then indeed be an appropriate position, but after being against them, he can still give them what they seek, but on very different terms.
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Wednesday, April 30, 2008 For the theologically inclined, a pop quiz: Whose theology does the following sentence describe?

"The human person only understands his or her identity to the extent that he or she is open to a relationship with Christ. Christology is deemed necessary for any adequate anthropology."

Hint: The name starts with "B".

ANSWER: Les jeux sont faits. (Bueller reference: drink!) The sentence is a description of current papal theology from the book nicely encapsulated here by Ryan Anderson.

The quotation is curious because the sentence sounds like it was pulled straight from some Barth 101 lecture notes. Open up his Church Dogmatics to III.2, the section on anthropology, and there in boldface are the words: "As the man Jesus is Himself the revealing Word of God, He is the source of our knowledge of the nature of man as created by God." What follows is a lengthy unpacking of the idea that only through Christ can we know what we, as humans, truly are. This in contrast to the notion that we first go to external anthropologies and attempt then to blend them with Christian faith.

In the long run (face it we must), most people aren't going to read Karl Barth. On a popular level, however, the way most people will make contact with Barth's ideas may, ironically enough, be thanks (via Balthasar) to Pope Benedict XVI. Is it possible, as some at the analogia entis conference seemed to cautiously imply, that the safest place to be a Barthian today is the Catholic church?

Conversely, for popular level Protestantism, consider one de facto Protestant spokesperson Anne Lamott in a mock - but nevertheless real - Sunday School teacher showdown with Catholic Colbert.
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the upside of ugly

Friday, April 25, 2008 Something positive may have come out of the abortion art antics. Consider that it makes Christian offers to write the art world a blank check look increasingly ridiculous. In short, the Tillichian paradigm, which I've tried to criticize here and more recently here (self-link: drink!), has passed its expiration date.

Things, however, may be changing. I'm aware of no "Go sister" Christian endorsements (if they're out there, don't tell me). Moreover, new confidence can be found in insightful analyses from First Things and Image. Ian Marcus Corbin laments the intellectual disarmament that incapacitates Shvarts' would-be critics, and Lucas Kwong bemoans the eclipse of art as "an autonomous object of beauty, subject to neither politics nor profit."

Add these to Dan Siedell's directing us toward a more Pauline (the apostle, that is) mode of engagement, and we have an encouraging prognosis of Christians and contemporary art. Not grumpy, but guarded; not yelling, but yawning; not seeking to siphon, but to give.

UPDATE: Michael J. Lewis chimes in with some measured reflections:

"It is often said that great achievement requires in one's formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others."

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Round-up

Thursday, April 24, 2008 College roommates of mine may remember the "Basta ya, no mas brutalidad" signs I came home with from Chicago protests. The rush of fraternizing with what was left of the black panther party was just that, a rush. That's why R.R. Reno, in Opium and Revolution, is so right about why Marx was so wrong. Revolution is the drug; religion the smelling salt.

Also, in light of John Henry Newman's pending beatification, don't neglect this quote of his (via Oakes) that summarizes so much of Newman's project, a project that turns pluralism on its head:

"[T]he doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian [Zoroastrian]; the connection of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin [Burmese and Cambodian Buddhists]; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian [pagan Greek]; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honors to the dead are a polytheism.... [Yet] So far from her creed being of doubtful credit because it resembles foreign theologies, we even hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world."

Furthermore, should one not have time to work through the Benedict addresses, this quote I came across from Carl A. Anderson adequately encapsulates his pontifical teaching thus far: "His encyclicals make a great effort to explain why... Christian hope differs from simple optimism or the secular idea of progress, and why Christian charity differs from government welfare or social services."

And finally, a few shots of Princeton in Spring.
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Tuesday, April 22, 2008 The Pope pics are in! The texts (PDF file) are even better.

We were indebted for our tickets to the Sisters of Life, hence our group paid them a visit the next day. Mass at the convent had some 57,525 less people than Yankee Stadium (there were about 20 of us), yet strangely, it was far more intense.
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an ornithology of art

Sunday, April 13, 2008 My diagnosis of contemporary art, an ecumenical cure, along with an homage to my undergrad art history professor can all be found in the current feature article of the Catholic literary journal Dappled Things. Don't miss the rest of the issue as well.
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Analogia Entis conference

Monday, April 07, 2008
When seeking clarity on a controversial issue, a heavy-hitting theology conference is not the first place to go. But for the time spent with friends, and the chance to see professionals articulate matters so much more knowledgably than I, it was well worth the trip. I came away with a better grasp of what generates both my admiration and anxiety with Karl Barth, and with a glimpse of the possibilities when perspicacious Catholics appropriate his best insights. Reinhard Hütter may have been onto something when he said the issue is not as divisive as it's made out to be, and is far from the top of the ecumenical priority list.

While it would be preposterous to attempt to sum up the nuance and sophistication of the entire weekend in one photograph, perhaps I did so above. That or I'm on the shortlist to be Thomas Kinkade's staff photographer.

Lest the message of that summarizing photograph seem too Catholic, at least I didn't pick this one.

UPDATE: For the slow of heart, I have added tags to the above photo (click on it to activate them). However, perhaps this photo encapsulates the conference even more adequately.
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Jesus of Whoville

Sunday, March 30, 2008
There are currently posters around the Princeton campus for a Faith film festival, and while arduous viewings of arthouse cinema from decades past would I'm sure be somehow rewarded, I've never been the Ingmar Bergman type. On the lower brow, even more tedious are most of Hollywood's self-conscious efforts at the faith film, for which we can be forgiven an exasperated, George Burns-inspired "Oh God." Conspicuous attempts at film faith (think The Truman Show or Bruce Almighty) are so much less satisfying than when, with an uncanny degree of frequency, faith comes as the unexpected surprise.

Horton Hears a Who was another such surprise, but distinguished itself not with hints or flickers of faith, but with an elaborate, extended theological message, by far the best I've encountered in a popular film. With proportions reminiscent of Lewis' The Great Divorce, the central characters (I remind you) are an elephant, and the microscopic world on a speck that the elephant communicates with, battles for, and for which he ultimately seems willing to die.

To recall a 2004 (ancient in blog years) millinerd theological post (my deconstruction of the parable departs a bit from Leslie Newbigin's), the idea of the elephant as God is a venerable tradition which the film brilliantly employs. The mayor of Whoville, who makes contact from his world with the elephant beyond it through a drainpipe of prayer, acts as a Christ figure; the giant hall of the mayor's descendants recall the genealogies in Matthew and Luke. The film's Trinitarian framework is completed with the Holy Spirit, who I would argue, makes an appearance through the film's prominent feature of sound.

Deaf to that sound is the town council, who serve as perfect Sadducees, ridiculing the idea of there being any elephant at all. Apocalyptic signs in Whoville (such as snow in summer) result either from the elephant's assuring Whoville of his presence, or from his battling against those who seek to destroy the speck. But for the Sadducees, such signs are merely an excuse for a kite flying contest. Strange as it may seem, Horton Hears a Who somehow recovers apocalyptic thought from the mists of Seminary sophistication, restoring its patent, palpable directness. In other words, when it comes to apocalypticism, I far prefer the clarity of Dr. Seuss to the resignations of Dr. Schweitzer.

The theological category of mystery is dangerously en vogue, but the scenario laid out by this film suggests that we should never pursue mystery for mystery's sake. Mystery can never mean obfuscation. The category is necessary due to temporary human incapacity for fathoming the contours of God's relation with our world - but mysteries will not always so remain. Horton Hears a Who somehow conveys the sheer physicality of faith: Big God, small world, real contact hindered by real difficulties. We will, one day, comprehend God's relation to our universe with as much intuitive sense as we understand the relation of the elephant to Whoville in this film. Whoville ears, eyes and senses just aren't big enough to discern the elephant (hence the need for mystery when describing him), but the elephant was definitely there; and "there," a Whoville word used to describe chairs, lamps and tables, barely does the pressing presence of such a massive being justice. Likewise, it's a small wonder that Moses only saw God's back.

Another of the film's more interesting feature is its unintentional commentary on religion in general. The elephant makes actual contact with Whoville, but this leads imitators to make up their own stories about tiny little worlds on specks. Imitating Horton, one creature posits "a world full of ponies who eat rainbows and poop butterflies." The difference of course is such worlds don't exist, and only make sense to the extent they are related to the actual world that Horton actually encounters. Likewise, a deluded man in Whoville who thought he was talking to a giant giraffe through a drainpipe would only be deluded. And while exposing this giant giraffe-delusion would fuel skepticism about a giant elephant, it would do nothing to change the fact that the elephant is still there. Faith is not a happy made-up story, but it can be. Faith, properly understood in this movie, is real contact with a real being, despite any vultures who get in the way, and despite the Richard Dawkins kangaroos who insist, "If you can't hear, see or feel something, it does not exist."

Of course the analogy breaks down, as God omnipotent is a good bit more confident than this rhyming pachyderm. Still, the elephant has spoken, and the Christian faith is poignantly summarized in the words, "I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful, one-hundred percent."
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All the way back

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Denise and I just returned from seeing Kurt Masur conduct the New York Philharmonic in a performance of what some call the finest piece of classical music ever written, the St. Matthew Passion. Lest that seem too urbane, a few nights before I saw 10,000 BC, the most historically inaccurate screenplay ever written (it should be retitled 15,000-2000 BC). That should restore my plebe cred.

At the close of the performance, the crowd was beside itself for Masur. His response to the applause was to lift up Bach's score and point to it. This was a fitting gesture, as Bach too was deferring in his Passion, musically lifting up Matthew's gospel, and pointing to it. Matthew, of course, is up to the same in his gospel, lifting up the Christ through prose, and pointing.

Masur to Bach to Matthew to Christ. Why stop short?
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up from irony

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 Why not pick up where disputations left off?

Irony, a gluttonous parasite, unbelief at play, the banner of a generation. 60% of television, 80% of contemporary art, and 100% of the merchandise for sale at Urban Outfitters. Fortress against falsehood, but also truth. A declaration of adulthood that ends in permanent adolescence. A Simpsons episode that turns into Family Guy.

For those seeking faith in a culture salted with irony, it's water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
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Icons and Absolutes

Monday, March 10, 2008
One irony of the postmodern fascination with icons is that the couch and candle crowd would likely be horrified at the theological firmness - the metaphysical guts - necessary to back them up. Rather than providing a break from the rigor of language and doctrine, icons are equally as binding. The Second Council of Nicea (787) insisted that the icon's purpose was,

in accordance with the narrative of the proclamation of the gospel, to ascertain the incarnation of God the Word, which was real, not imaginary.

Icons stand by the gospels as witnesses to objective, actual persons and events. The icon, properly understood, is no friend of ambiguity. Icons then are a trojan horse in the New Age giftshop. Be sure not to tell, but the icons for sale to disgruntled Evangelicals on that book table at the From Fundamentalism to Foucault conference, are smuggled absolutes.

A further irony of postmodern fascination with icons is that few things could be less conducive to the "visual turn" than classic postmodern thought. Consider Martin Jay's magisterial study, Downcast Eyes, a sweeping summary of which can be found in this whopper of a paragraph:

Virtually all the twentieth-century French intellectuals encountered on this voyage were extraordinarily sensitive to the importance of the visual and no less suspicious of its implications. Although definitions of visuality vary from thinker to thinker, it is clear that ocularcentrism aroused (and continues in many quarters to arouse) a widely shared distrust. Bergson's critique of the spatialization of time, Bataille's celebration of the blinding sun and the acephalic body, Breton's ultimate disenchantment with the savage eye, Sartre's depiction of the sadomasochism of the "look," Merleau-Ponty's diminished faith in a new ontology of vision, Lacan's disparagement of the ego produced by mirror stae, Althusser's appropriation of Lacan for a Marxist theory of ideology, Foucault's strictures against the medical gaze and panoptic surveillance, Debord's critique of the society of the spectacle, Barthes's linkage of photography and death, Metz's excoriation of the scopic regime of the cinema, Derrida's double reading of the specular tradition of philosophy and the white mythology, Irigaray's outrage at the privileging of the visual in patriarchy, Levinas's claim that ethics is thwarted by a visually based ontology, and Lyotard's identification of postmodernism with the sublime foreclosure of the visual - all these evince, to put it mildly, a palpable loss of confidence in the hitherto "noblest of the senses."

I think that might be about all of 'em. Small wonder that those who forget how to speak, soon forget how to see as well. If Martin Jay is right, Christians unduly adulating postmodernity might consider doing away with paintbrushes altogether, and pick up the Iconoclast's hatchet instead.

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References:
Daniel J. Sahas, Icon and Logos: Sources in Eighth Century Iconoclasm (p. 178).
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (p. 588).
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Wednesday, March 05, 2008 It was only a matter of time before SWPL did grad school.

To avoid these obvious pitfalls, one could hearken to the European University's monastic origins, mix in some spiritual discipline, and consider grad school a contemplative sort of enterprise. With the cloister-like graduate college of Ralph Adams Cram, not to mention the prominent motto, Princeton gives the notion at least some architectural endorsement.

update: Writes one commenter, "Divinity School is the worst. It's the new I-take-Psychology-to-figure-out-why-I'm-messed-up subject." Ouch.
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Monday, March 03, 2008 Pictures to go with my post at FT today can be seen at the North American Churches group blog.

Also of interest regarding the Schaeffer legacy is the penetrating article by Molly Worthen in the current Christianity Today, which examines the present state (decline?) of L'Abri. She makes a keen observation about Christian buzzwords like "authenticity" and "experience":

When students say they seek authenticity, what they really want is certainty, an inner knowing. Convinced that they won't find it intellectually, many pursue that feeling of conviction through experience.

Are such buzzwords then just a new kind of absolute?

update: If you missed it the first time, once again, Schaeffer is mean and Guinness is gracious. But we do get some more dirty secrets, like "27 year old single man attracted to women." Scandalous.
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Luke University

Friday, February 29, 2008 Luke chapter 20 could be subtitled "Christ among the academics," especially religious academics. Like anyone claiming religious truth today, the accusation from the worldly wise - as from the Sophistichristians - is, "Who is it that gave you this authority" (20:2)? In other words, "How dare you traffic in metanarratives?"

Realizing that the perpetual questioning of authority is itself a uniquely oppressive authority (Chesterton's reply to Nietzsche's "Question authority" was "Say's who?"), Christ throws in a wrench to stall the scribal gears. Lacking the metaphysical guts to answer a simple question - whether John's baptism was from God or man - the religious academics give up. Christ thereby proves to the crowd that their chief teachers, by virtue of their supreme sophistication, have become incapable of making any pronouncements at all. We imagine Christ smiling as he says, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things" (20:8). How can you have a conversation with someone who is unable to speak?

Example: Are you a believer or not M. Derrida? Sorry, I'm far too sophisticated to answer that, and anyone who can is "naïve." (Hear it in his own words here.)

Luke 20 continues. After an infuriating parable, the academics send in their big guns, "spies who pretended to be honest" (20:20). Here are those who claim to honor the "richness of the faith heritage" for its narrative value, the ones for whom aesthetics trump truth. Christ, however, knows their hearts. The spies' attempt at entrapment leads to that most brilliant answer, "Render unto Caesar...", but no matter. In Luke 23:2, they'll simply lie about what he said anyway to get him killed.

Next, the Sadducees pipe in with a logical circus trick intended to show literal belief in the resurrection to be ridiculous. "What about the legend of the septupletly wedded wife?" These are the materialists, who will always be with us. Christ dismantles the threat only to show that yes, he actually believes in real resurrections (20:34-38). Everyone's impressed, but the show goes on.

Christ fires back with his own question, leaving them hanging for an answer. "What do you make of Psalm 110:1?" I too, Christ seems to be suggesting, am familiar with the baffling complexity of Scripture, but it doesn't lead me to worship the goddess of ambiguity, and her consort, the lord of liquidity. Familiarity with the complexities of Scripture does not leave one without an answer: They're looking at the answer.

Christ closes his speech to the religious academics - who are too sophisticated for simple belief, who know so many options that they can't pick one - with yet another possibility that they're unprepared to take seriously: Outright condemnation (20:45-7).

Today, one never quite know where the Sophistichristians will arise. Who would have expected them in self-professedly Evangelical circles and publications, but there they so frequently appear. And lo, in a frankly feminist medieval history text, one finds this from historian Barbara Newman:

Finally, and most controversially, I believe that religious experience reveals the traces, however opaquely filtered, of a real and transcendent object. This is not to exclude the possibilities of self-deception and deliberate fraud, both common in medieval Christendom as in all societies where religion is a hegemonic force... Nevertheless, I assert this conviction to clarify my theoretical stance and to overthrow the last bastion of reductionism. To leave a space for transcendence means to allow for the possibility that, when historical subjects assert religious belief or experience as the motive of their actions, they may at times be telling the truth.... It was not because of their commitment to feminism, self-empowerment, subversion, sexuality, or "the body" that [medieval woman] struggled and won their voices; it was because of their commitment to God.

While the Sophistichristians can't afford such transparency, a secular historian - no doubt at significant personal cost - can? I suppose such clarity of prose makes Newman, at least for M. Derrida, a bit dense. To the Christ of Luke, I imagine it would make her luminous. "I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel" (Luke 7:9)!

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References
From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (pp. 16-17, and 246).
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credit where it's due

Friday, February 22, 2008 I'm inventing a blog award for unbridled excellence. One time only, and the winner is in: Stuff White People Like. (If you already know about it, oh well.) The posts may sting a little, which is why they're particularly appropriate for Lent.

Don't miss NPR, Mac, Apologies, Arrested Development, DailyShow/Colbert , Prius, Knowing what's best for poor people, Recycling, and so much more. Irony was one of my favorites, but one must admit the commenter who said "nothing is more ironic than stuffwhitepeoplelike" has a point. Other comments aren't nearly so edifying.

While the mockery (let's face it) is earned, how does one escape the scourge? The site, it seems to me, has a lot to do with what we white people - indeed, any people - become when we lose the gospel - that most reliable tool for relentless self-criticism, that trusty crowbar for prying oneself from the world.

Then again, on Sunday mornings, there's always the Times.
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