Fireplace Stand-Ins

On the seventh day of Christmas millinerd gave to me: Two more beer recommendations. Gritty McDuff's Christmas Ale from Maine, and the intimidatingly good Gouden Carolus Nöel from Deutschland. Gritty tops Celebration Ale, providing further evidence for East Coast rivaling West Coast breweries, but both coasts have a long way to go before they rival Germany.

None of this Christmas is over stuff please. Five days to go. Stretch it out.

Enemies of World Prosperity

In the current New York Review of Books, Princeton economist Paul Krugman explains the pressing necessity for government economic intervention. "Nothing could be worse," he tell us, "than failing to do what's necessary out of fear that acting to save the financial system is somehow 'socialist.'" He refers to relatively successful interventions in the economic crises of Sweden and Japan to prove his case. "I believe," concludes Krugman, "that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men."

Just what are these obsolete doctrines? We are not told. Certainly it can't be traditional conservative ideas about a free market, for to be for a free market in no way suggests one opposes all government regulation. This is of course a common cartoon of the conservative position, but something that surely a Nobel Prize winning economist such as Krugman would avoid. Take Yuval Levin writing in the National Review:

Fiscal conservatives are not opposed to government regulation of the financial markets, provided the goal is to help the market work and not to replace it. Social conservatives are not opposed to public assistance to the poor, provided its aims are to strengthen and grow families and not to replace them.

The overarching principles behind his position are what gives Levin's writing such acuity:

The market is our way of contending with permanent intellectual imperfection, and of channeling individual avarice toward common prosperity in a free society. Alternative ways of pursuing prosperity tend to fail because they fall back on two delusions: that we can know enough to govern the economy in every detail, and that a reallocation of resources can eradicate poverty.

Reasonable conservatives believe that limited government regulation is necessary, like an umpire who calls strikes or breaks up a fight, but doesn't pick up a player and carry him to first base. That said, whoever these ideologues are who are roadblocking world prosperity, I sure hope Krugman finds them. They sound like really bad guys.

Merry Christmas millinerd readers

Winter Birds
Originally uploaded by millinerd

Thank you all for reading and commenting through yet another year (the fifth). Under the tree you'll find two gifts: First, to make up for a campaign season of MSNBC vs. FOX soundbites, I give you bloggingheads.tv (in case you haven't yet discovered it). Intelligent liberals and intelligent conservatives (lots of them) in extended conversation. The posts may be long, but they're podcastable, and we don't have a dishwasher. The second gift is meaningoflife.tv where one can find a whole lot of people to disagree with.

I'm almost as enthusiastic about bloggingheads as I was about recommending the teaching company, the post that got this whole thing started. Though back then we looked more like this (courtesy of the waybackmachine).

As to the photo, I took it a few steps outside my front door this weekend and thought it was kind of Christmassy. Those who went to Wheaton may catch the reference to a strange holiday e-card alums received that involved a stiltedly-animated cardinal flying around campus.

Not Waiting for Benedict

My collegiate pride was stirred to see Wheaton College's own Alan Jacobs charitably dismantle several strands of the pop post-evangelicalism that crowd the Barnes & Noble shelves today ("Do-It-Yourself Tradition," First Things, January 2009). I look forward to seeing whether the "very now-minded American Protestants" that Jacobs criticizes will respond with a delight in being deconstructed, or with the you-don't-get-it defensiveness that has often characterized their reaction to serious critique.

A few samples:

All you need to know about Halter and Smay's book The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community may be this: Their chapter on this history of the Church since the fourth century is called "The 1,700 Year Wedgie"... May God bless their work. But neither good hearts nor good works can make a good book out of very bad one.

In lectures and speeches, [Brian] McLaren often pauses to say that he really does believe that doctrine is important. But he has to say this because he doesn't otherwise show signs of being interested in it. As far as I can tell, McLaren thinks getting doctrine right is easy - comparatively speaking, anyway. But the history of Christianity scarcely bears out that confidence.

Set the bar for monasticism as low as Wilson-Hartgrove sets it and you might as well call a Christian college dormitory a monastic institution... The disciplines and practices of our Christin ancestors are not toys or tools; they are hope of life to those who are perishing.

Rather than snuffing a smoldering wick, however, Jacobs ends with a note of commiseration. He too shares an acute awareness of the inadequacy of current forms of evangelical life. Borrowing terminology from Charles Taylor, Jacobs hopes to lead us towards a more "porous" spirituality; but he admits to being not exactly sure what that involves. Jacobs suggests that "for the wiser," Kierkegaard's worldly knight of faith "will seem too hard." But Jacobs' second option, full monastic retreat, has lost its appeal due to the comforting "buffers" of modern life. Summoning Alisdair MacIntyre, Jacobs suggests we are still waiting for a new St. Benedict, "someone who can articulate a whole way of life and call us to it."

We do indeed need such a figure, someone who can take the solitary, impossible ideals of Kierkegaard's knight of faith and translate them into the realizable discipline of an army, someone who can develop a rule for robust Christian practice that can, in Jacobs' words, "flourish in the saeculum." But should this be the job description, our new Benedict may have already come and gone. His name was José Maria Escriva. As an evangelical myself (albeit a not very good one), it is unsettling to note a contemporary irony: While Protestants today promote pseudo-monasticism, Opus Dei - the movement founded by Escriva - continues to be the most forceful contemporary advocate for traditionally Protestant foci: the priesthood of all believers, the sanctity of all vocations, and holiness of the laity in the midst of the world.

Jacobs asks, "What would a serious abbess think that the lifelong disciplines of her people could simply be transferred to the daily experience of a lawyer or a plumber?" The answer is she would be scandalized, as was most of the Catholic world by Escriva until, despite serious resistance, his brand of plumber-piety was approved. It's time Protestants get past the albino and cilice jokes and learn more about what is colloquially referred to as "the work," if only to be reminded of insights we like to think are our own. The definitive book on the movement by the veteran reporter John L. Allen Jr. (no conservative lackey), has essentially functioned as an exoneration, and it is a pleasure to read as well.

Art as Religion

It's a pleasure when a book one has enjoyed, thanks to the much-maligned blog medium, does not end. In his book God in the Gallery, Daniel Siedell - I have tried to argue previously - has effectively reframed the Christianity and art conversation. I've found the last several posts at Siedell's blog a helpful development of his argument. There may be many paths the religion and art conversation are treading, but I find this one the most interesting, and I intend to follow it.

Art and religion, Siedell suggests, are kin (though he downplays the consequent sibling rivalry). In her recent book, Seven Days in the Art World, sociologist Sarah Thornton agrees. She asserts that art today is based on a common belief that has "transformed contemporary art into a kind of alternative religion for atheists." One could summon a host of other book-length witnesses. There's Ziolkowski, Chai, and perhaps most famously Bell, to name just a few. The point of art-as-religion is not an accusation made by Christians. It is a fact asserted by the secular world. Nietzsche, as is so often the case, puts it best:

The feelings expelled from the sphere of religion by the Enlightenment throw themselves into art.

Strangely, but not unconvincingly, Siedell posits this as a basis for Christian engagement of the art world, not its critique. I imagine (read: hope) this will initially make some people nervous. Siedell wants Christians to understand the art world on its own terms - to immerse themselves in it, even should it be a parallel faith. Would he advise the same strategy to Christians dealing with more established religion such as Voodoo (the analogy is the art world's, not mine)? Would he advise Christians to have more faith in foreign deities to help them be effective believers in Christ? What about conversion from one religion to another? What about not serving two masters? These are the kind of questions that would be especially raised not just by conservative Christian colleges Siedell engages, but especially by the Russian Orthodox theologians whom he repeatedly invokes.

But to ask these questions, I think, is to misunderstand Siedell. He has already effectively fielded these objections in God in the Gallery. "The church's aesthetics and poetics," he suggest, "is the ground of all aesthetics and poetics." It seems to me that he has the kind of confidence in Christian faith that sees this other religion called "art" as a stimulant, but not very much of a threat. Therefore, one can participate in its rituals without risking some kind of spiritual promiscuity. This confidence, I think, is what makes his kind of engagement fruitful, and what keeps it from devolving into some kind of pluralistic compromise. Siedell's firm theological conviction, not wobbly doctrine, is what enables him to build a sturdy analogical bridge between the Christianity and the "religion" of art. What's more, this analogy makes practicing Christians naturally disposed toward intelligent participation in the art world - if only they would make the effort.

In his recent posts, Siedell worries that Christians will continue to refuse engagement of contemporary art. My fear, however, is different. I fear they will do so without a confidence similar to Siedell's. When Christianity lacks - as it generally does in this country - a coherent visual tradition, the ability to engage visual art with self-assurance is decreased. Therefore, the Christian art colleges described (decried?) by Siedell have a twofold task: They need both teach students to engage the contemporary art world on its own terms, and to restore a coherent Christian visual tradition, one that Siedell acknowledges the need for in his book by pointing to the importance of liturgical art. This is, of course, a lot to ask.

Crisis of Faith
While I hope it's clear I find Siedell convincing, I'd like to point out a potential pitfall on this path. If we take Siedell's art-as-religion analogy at face value, what happens when the new religion is on the rocks? Oddly enough, the lion's share of irreverence within the religion of art is not coming from present day Savonarolas, but from artists themselves. Martí nez Celaya, a contemporary artist focused upon Siedell's book, may be one of them. In a review I'm indebted to Siedell for sending along, Celaya explains

I'm not interested in luscious, sexy, virtuosic painting, but the destruction of the image, undermining the certainty of the image.

Elsewhere Celaya describes his aspiration to make paintings that fail.

You may read other things about [my] "October Cycle" but you shouldn't trust them including whatever I've said. The "October Cycle" is a failure, those of you who dislike this work already know that and those of you who like the work should see to quickly understand its futility (62).

That may be just theory speak, but I like to think it betrays something deeper: Celaya's lack of confidence in art as faith. Now of course there are those who wish to import that exact deconstructive tendency into Christianity, but that won't work. It has, after all, always been there, but in a much more interesting way.

So, what does the adherent of a more tested religion [Christianity] do when adherents of a parallel religion [art] have a crisis of faith? Is it too much for a Christian, working in Siedell's paradigm, to suggest a faith (their own) that affords something - someone - more worthy of confidence? Surely not. The art world is packed with those who lost their faith in Christianity, which is why Christian images haunt the art world. Conversion, however, is a two way street.

Siedell paints a sorry picture of Christian college art departments today, and perhaps he's right. We could all perhaps stand to give contemporary art more of a chance. But the sorriest picture of all would be this: Those same Christian art departments keeping a rival religion on life support despite continuing signals that, parts of it at least, may just want to die.

UPDATE: Dan Siedell has been kind enough to respond to this post at his blog.

Kid Stuff

Children's literature? I'll admit I found the topic, initially, less than compelling. R.R. Reno recently interviewed Jody Bottum regarding his article, Children's Books, Lost and Found, where Bottum suggests that we are now living in a golden age of the genre. Reno offers that this may be because themes of good and evil - less welcome in cutting edge literature - have been pushed into the children or adolescent bracket. Consider, for example, the moral seriousness, the flashing fluorescent line between good and evil drawn straight down the middle of the Harry Potter franchise.

Then consider that the novel one might typically reference to illustrate the metaphysical fog of contemporary fiction - David Foster Wallace's phonebook-sized Infinite Jest - may be less an example of such moral abdication in contemporary literature as the exposure of the same. A novelist like Wallace both proves Reno's helpful point and subverts it. In one of the more prescient articles I've read in a good while, Mark Hemingway explains:

What Wallace wrought in Infinite Jest and elsewherer wasn't just brilliant writing in the vein of a previous generation of postmodernists (think Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, DeLillo) so much as a response to them.

Wallace was clever enough to "adeptly mimick nearly every major postmodern writer - solely for the purpose of exposing the limitations of their cleverness..." Because of the sort of serious advice Wallace offered in his famous Kenyon College commencement speech, Hemingway insists it is "hard not to see his writing as something of a cri de couer against many of his immediate literary forebears." Hemingway even places Wallace's suicide within this interpretive framework.

If he hated solipsism, that hatred might well have been a result of hating the thing he feared the most - that he would give in to his own demons. Which, in the end, is exactly what he did.

But back to children. Wallace aside, if contemporary letters has ceded to the striplings the epic struggle between good and evil, a similar phenomenon is afoot in film. I've tried to make the case previously that Horton Hears a Who bears nearly as much theological weight as an Andrei Tarkovsky film. But what Horton does for the objective theological project, Bolt does for the theology's subjective aspect. I can't explain myself without giving too much away, but let's just say Bolt does everything The Truman Show tried to do, the difference being that Bolt actually succeeds.

Today, characters in award winning films literally roll in the meaningless mud (award prediction, by the way, confirmed), but an even grittier nihilism is on offer in something like the Sex in City film. Ross Douthat, in a very effective review, encapsulates the series telos in this way:

All that they [Carrie and Mr. Big] have, post-courtship is that he likes to buy things for her and she likes to accept them. Near the end of the movie, Big e-mails her passages from famous love letters, but he'd be better off quoting Nietzsche: He's about to marry the Last Woman.

Meanwhile, however, we have the animated Nicene Creed (Horton) and a refutation of the sociological critique of religion through 3-D glasses (Bolt), so suffer the little children's genre to come unto me.

Lander@Google

I retract. Regarding grad school, perhaps Lander has it on Manolo after all (start at 4:10).

I did two years of a Ph.D. in film and literature and I gave up. What I found when I was there was that it was lot of people who were really intolerant of any other view besides their own, meaning far left wing academic was the only way to think, and anyone who thought differently - not that I'm necessarily a conservative or a conservative at all - but anyone who thought differently was shut up immediately, and it just drove me nuts to see people so close-minded in graduate school and profess to be open-minded because they supported progressive issues - No, that just means you support progressive issues, that doesn't mean your open-minded. So I left.

Whether or not grad school is actually that bad, I consider my Trojan horse theory confirmed. And speaking of open-mindedness, looks like Google has hosted Tim Keller as well.

Writing on the Wall

Nature's Laws are God's Thoughts
Originally uploaded by millinerd

Regarding the relationship between science and faith, our nation's top schools are anything but ambivalent. You just have to know where to look. The inscription above is from Bowdoin College (someone was reading The Summa), and Princeton's message is even more explicit.

the other market

Ross Douthat has repeatedly made some important points about the relative thinness of the American Christianity, left or right. His observations, however, are best understood within the framework sketched out yesterday by RJN:

In America, where more than 90 percent of the people say they believe in God and well over 80 percent claim to be Christians of one sort or another, Christianity is a bull market. We can debate until the wee hours of the morning whether this is "authentic" or "biblical" or "orthodox" Christianity, but the fact is that this is the form - composed of myriad forms - of the Christian movement in our time and place.

Manolo appears to understand graduate students (at their worst) even better than Christian Lander does.

Day After T-Day Spectacular
Originally uploaded by millinerd

Just so you know, we practice what we preach (click image for full effect).