“Let’s make like we’re not through,” she writes, and it’s all any of us can do—go on making things, making likenesses, as if we were not already finished, not already broken up, not already out the other side, like so many people we knew, like all the things they said.
-Michael Robbins at Books & Culture (of Alien v Predator fame/notoriety), writing w/ Elizabeth Wheeler after providing a poet’s elliptical critique of her latest volume of poetry
If theorists were thought artists
and deckle edged histories
were watercolors hung
on pocked kitchen window panes
& lived-in between the soap bubbles
and scraps of breading
would wisdom be better loved?
If polemics were poems,
and comments were songs
think what growing they’d have to do
to be sung
by cross legged children
under a clanking upright
& a teacher’s arched brow.
Recycled water tastes almost wet,
almost slakes thirst;
it is better for water parks,
a use for an enjoyment: slide lubricant.
Terrariums, ant farms, and cake stands
and other helpful exhibits
become fatal traps
when the lid never comes off.
“This is all very sweet, but some of Harvey’s own mystifications leave an unpleasant taste. It is not only that the apparent practice of submitting articles under fictitious names to scholarly journals might well have a chilling effect on the ability of really existing independent scholars to place their work. Nor is it just the embarrassment caused to editors who might in an ideal world have taken more pains to check the contributions of Stephanie Harvey or Trevor McGovern, but who accepted them in good faith, partly out of a wish to make their publications as inclusive as possible. The worst thing here, if they are fictitious, is a violation of the trust that remains a constitutive element of the humanities. There is, it seems to me, a fundamental difference between posting partisan, anonymous reviews on Amazon, where there is no assumption of proper evaluative standards or impartiality, and placing similar reviews or hoaxing articles in academic journals, which are still the most hallowed sites for the development and transmission of humanistic ideas. The former is a cheap act of virtual graffiti; the latter may be the closest a secular scholar can come to desecration.” (emphasis added)
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1243205.ece
At present I’m avoiding writing a 20-pager, but had to pause to read this. I have to say that the self-induced schizophrenic who has concocted a web of academics and novelists who slyly refer to one another, reminds me a bit of Ivan Karamazov as he first appears in BK .
Grantland’s Jay Kang describes what makes the NCAA a power & principality: we can’t imagine a world w/o it:
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9152313/the-problem-loving-ncaa
“For a critique of the NCAA to find any real footing, it must go after the whole damn thing. This requires college sports apologists like myself to fully divorce ourselves from those principles of amateurism and community and believe that those same ideas could find a place in an entirely new context devoid of the NCAA and its copyrighted library of images. This requires a feat of imagination that might not actually be possible — we would have to watch the tournament without the constant, long-since-commercialized images of Christian Laettner, Bryce Drew, and, now, Sherwood Brown. We have to believe the sight of Kevin Ware cutting down the net on crutches would be possible without March Madness™. We have to believe college sports can still deliver a different thrill than the pros, even if the players are getting paid what they’re due.”
Christianity has from its beginning portrayed itself as a gospel of peace, a way of reconciliation (with God, with other creatures), and a new model of human community, offering the “peace which passes understanding” to a world enmeshed in sin and violence. The earliest confession of Christian faith – κύριος Ἰησοῦς - meant nothing less radical than that Christ’s peace, having suffered upon the cross the decisive rejection of the powers of this world, had been raised up by God as the true form of human existence: an eschatologically perfect love, now made invulnerable to all the violences of time, and yet also made incomprehensibly present in the midst of history, because God’s final judgment had already befallen the world in the paschal vindication of Jesus of Nazareth. It is only as the offer of this peace within time, as a real and available practice, that the Christian evangel (and, in particular, the claim that Christ crucified has been raised from the dead) has any meaning at all; only if the form of Christ can be lived out in the community of the church is the confession of the church true; only if Christ can be practiced is Jesus Lord. No matter how often the subsequent history of the church belied this confession, it is this presence within time of an eschatological and divine peace, really incarnate in the person of Jesus and forever imparted to the body of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, that remains the very essence of the church’s evangelical appeal to the world at large, and of the salvation it proclaims.
Much confusion results when people attempt to talk about God, all the while believing in different Gods. The new atheist debates never turned into real conversations because Ditchkens was talking about a God whose existence can be proven using the methods of science, while traditional Christians believe in a God who cannot be proven in such a fashion. Karen Armstrong brings up another possibility for who the trine God is:
“The Trinity was not a “mystery” because it was irrational mumbo-jumbo. It was an “initiation” (musterion), which introduced Greek-speaking early Christians to a new way of thinking about the divine, a meditative exercise in which the mind swung in a disciplined way from what you thought you knew about God to the ineffable reality. If performed correctly it led to ekstasis.”
And here:
“The biblical God is a “starter kit”; if we have the inclination and ability, we are meant to move on. Throughout history, however, many people have been content with a personalized deity, yet not because they “believed” in it but because they learned to behave – ritually and ethically – in a way that made it a reality.” (emphasis added)
According to Armstrong’s vision, a religious person is alot like a chef. A chef begins with a few ingredients, & using time and care and training, that chef creates something new - (ta-da) a dish! That dish is not present without without the chef’s efforts and devotion. You don’t look at a chef in an empty kitchen and say - “there is a loaf of bread.” You don’t look at a chef in a kitchen with a few jars of flower and say - “there is a loaf of bread.” If bread is to remain in the kitchen, the chef must bake it day in and day out - the chef must fill the air with the aroma of bread. This bread is good, and when one tastes it one can almost say that this bread is positively transcendent. In order to do this, the chef must take the recipe very seriously - the chef must have faith that the combination of ingredients & time will bring something about - thus the chef believes in the recipe - he believes in the effectiveness of the recipe when followed under the right conditions.
Reinterpretations of what ‘belief’ means are a dime a dozen within faith communities. You may recall a breathless baptist asking whether you really believe in Jesus. Or you may remember having someone tell you that Greek word for belief implies that the person who believes in a truth is actively relying on that truth. Armstrong engages in the same line of questioning with a surprising result:
“In the late 17th century, the English word “belief” changed its meaning and became the intellectual acceptance of a somewhat dubious proposition. Religious people now think that they have to “believe” a set of incomprehensible doctrines before embarking on a religious way of life. This makes no sense. On the contrary, faith demands a disciplined and practical transcendence of egotism, a “stepping outside” the self which brings intimations of transcendent meaning that makes sense of our flawed and tragic world.”
It’s difficult to follow Armstrong here. Clearly she doesn’t agree with the 17th century “English” interpolation with regard to the word belief. But, her proposal for what belief really means seems even more ridiculous - it requires a wholly foreign understanding of people (how can you not read her proposal and wonder what self means - is it possible that when she says ‘self’ she is referring to a group of practices in the modern world that themselves produce a referent for the word ‘self’?). Armstrong’s article spends alot of time attempting to defuse religious truth claims by saying that they are shorthand references to practices and have no bearing on reality (thus, trinity refers to a set of destabilizing meditative practices, not to the idea that God is somehow Father Son and Holy Spirit). Yet, she fails to level critical reflection left at her own very modern assumptions: that there is such thing as a self, that one can someone step outside the self, that this stepping outside brings one into a sphere of transcendence…
One of the saddest parts of this brief bit from Armstrong is her deceptive use of outside authorities. When it comes to the ecclesial authorities under whom Armstrong has skeptically studied without really being influenced, she can namedrop and concept drop with the best of them. But when it comes to her intuitions about the self, and about practices, she would have the reader think that she is just talking common sense [really there is a whole mash-up of religious studies thought regarding psychology and religious practices going on, that must at least involve Clifford Geertz and Freud]. This deceptive omission of reliance on tradition is remarkable.
Armstrong wants the secular side of things to be common sense, and the religious side to refer to a temporally and culturally distant group of people who she has been lucky enough to have the time to read. Armstrong bills herself as a common sense person who has travelled to the far lands of those who take religion seriously (a bit too seriously for her liking), and now can report back: ‘I have studied all the esoterica of faith, and I can report back to you laymen that you have it basically figured out already, but need a few slight modifications in attitude.’ She offers herself as a go-between who can render the life of faith in terms palatable to the ‘modern educated reader’ in such a way that will be ‘challenging’ to the person of faith and comforting to those who will buy her books.
Though I haven’t seen the movie beyond its strangely mesmerizing trailer, Manohla Dargis’ review of Spring Breakers is worth thinking about - what does the movie says about American culture, what does it say about those involved making the movie, what it says about us who enjoy the whole spectacle. Are we critics, participants, exploiters, connoisseurs?
One fascinating thought can be drawn from reading reports from the movie’s production: the evolution undertaken by the characters in the movie mirrors the evolution that the actresses hope to undergo - from listlessness to life, from the innocence of being unexploited to the glories of being morally complicated - w/ both groups being guided by a saavy, streetsmart, and more morally progressed older male. Selena Gomez recalls how the director, Harmony Korine, approached her:
“Harmony said, ‘Are you ready to leave your world behind for now and just come be with me and the girls?’ I just said, ‘I’m definitely ready and willing,’” Ms. Gomez recalled. “He looked past what I seem to be publicly and really took a chance on me.”
They bond with the auteur of their futures, identify with them, and act out of a feeling of debt and gratefulness. I think exploit is the verb here to explore, & I expect that this is a script that is acted out in many more places than I have the heart to ponder for now.
The reliance on intensifiers demonstrates the emptiness of American Christianity’s language. Previous generations were content singing “trust and obey, for there’s no other way.” Today we have to really trust and truly obey. The inflated rhetoric is a sign of how divorced our churches’ vocabulary is from the simple language of Scripture.
And the intensifiers don’t solve the problem. Replacing belief with commitment still places the burden of our formation on the sheer force of our will. As much as some of these radical pastors would say otherwise, their rhetoric still relies on listeners “making a decision.”
There is almost no explicit consideration of how beliefs actually take root, or whether that process is as conscious as we presume.Or as dramatic. The heroes of the radical movement are martyrs and missionaries whose stories truly inspire, along with families who make sacrifices to adopt children. Yet the radicals’ repeated portrait of faith underemphasizes the less spectacular, frequently boring, and overwhelmingly anonymous elements that make up much of the Christian life.
