Read More » Lots to be gleaned from Judith Shulevitz’s “The Lethality of Loneliness” in The New Republic and not just because it dovetails so neatly with Ethan’s post on the bodily aspects of anxiety last week. The article explores some recent research into loneliness and manages to ring a few alarm bells in the process. It may go without saying, but far from being just a spiritual or emotional malady, loneliness has been shown to have a clear physical component/consequence. Introversion or extroversion simply changes the way a person experiences loneliness–it does not protect them from it outright. More commentary at the bottom, ht TB ZW:

Over the past half-century, academic psychologists have largely abandoned psychoanalysis and made themselves over as biologists. And as they delve deeper into the workings of cells and nerves, they are confirming that loneliness is as monstrous as [pioneering psychoanalyst Frieda] Fromm-Reichmann said it was. It has now been linked with a wide array of bodily ailments as well as the old mental ones.

…long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking.

The psychological definition of loneliness hasn’t changed much since Fromm-Reichmann laid it out. “Real loneliness,” as she called it, is not what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard characterized as the “shut-upness” and solitariness of the civilized. Nor is “real loneliness” the happy solitude of the productive artist or the passing irritation of being cooped up with the flu while all your friends go off on some adventure. It’s not being dissatisfied with your companion of the moment—your friend or lover or even spouse— unless you chronically find yourself in that situation, in which case you may in fact be a lonely person. Fromm-Reichmann even distinguished “real loneliness” from mourning, since the well-adjusted eventually get over that, and from depression, which may be a symptom of loneliness but is rarely the cause. Loneliness, she said—and this will surprise no one—is the want of intimacy.

Loneliness “is not synonymous with being alone, nor does being with others guarantee protection from feelings of loneliness,” writes John Cacioppo, the leading psychologist on the subject. Cacioppo privileges the emotion over the social fact because—remarkably—he’s sure that it’s the feeling that wreaks havoc on the body and brain.

In a survey published by the AARP in 2010, slightly more than one out of three adults 45 and over reported being chronically lonely (meaning they’ve been lonely for a long time). A decade earlier, only one out of five said that.

As W. H. Auden put it, “We must love one another or die.”

Women are lonelier than men (though unmarried men are lonelier than unmarried women). African Americans are lonelier than whites (though single African American women are less lonely than Hispanic and white women). The less educated are lonelier than the better educated. The unemployed and the retired are lonelier than the employed.

A key part of feeling lonely is feeling rejected, and that, it turns out, is the most damaging part.

At a deeper level, though, loneliness research forces us to acknowledge our own extraordinary malleability in the face of social forces. This susceptibility is both terrifying and exhilarating.

This all reminds me of that old youth group truism about people being “made for relationship”, that Christianity represents a rejoinder to the fiercely independent be-our-own-gods streak that informs so much human striving and individualism and often seems just as innate a drive as our longing for love (you might even call it a curse…). In other words, here we have biology inconveniently trumping ideology once again, or at least our notion of ourselves as self-sufficient creatures. Of course, the antidote to loneliness isn’t relationship, per se, but a specific kind of relationship, i.e. one that both knows and loves. Or as a friend so eloquently explained to me once, “If I lock my dog and my wife in the trunk of my car, in an hour, only one of them will be happy to see me. The dog loves but doesn’t know. The wife knows but doesn’t love, at least in the moment.” Whatever the case, death as the endpoint of isolation has more than a little biblical grounding, and one can’t help but wonder what other innate spiritual needs may be expressing themselves in our day to day, in spite of (and possibly in direct proportion to) our attempts to control them. On the other hand, these findings certainly put those parables about shepherds leaving ninety-nine to go after the one lost sheep into sharper and more comforting relief. One being, you know:

I noticed an interesting phenomenon the other day: I only want to be told what I already know to be true. More specifically, I only want to hear the things I already think. It’s been a long time since I read a book that I didn’t know for sure I would like (a theology book anyway…I’m a little more forgiving of pop fiction) or ordered something from a menu that I hadn’t had (and liked) before. It’s a long-understood truism that the politically interested tend to watch and listen to the “news” programs that affirm their pre-existing beliefs.  What I…

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I noticed an interesting phenomenon the other day: I only want to be told what I already know to be true. More specifically, I only want to hear the things I already think. It’s been a long time since I read a book that I didn’t know for sure I would like (a theology book anyway…I’m a little more forgiving of pop fiction) or ordered something from a menu that I hadn’t had (and liked) before. It’s a long-understood truism that the politically interested tend to watch and listen to the “news” programs that affirm their pre-existing beliefs.  What I realized the other day, though, is that this phenomenon is true in every sector of my life.

I habitually (ritually? Even, God help me, religiously?) watch SportsCenter every morning…there’s just too many games to get to each night. When a team that I cheer for suffered a defeat last week, I realized something: I didn’t want to watch SportsCenter because they were going to tell me that my team played poorly. Now, I know that my team played poorly; I’m not in denial. I just don’t want to hear it. What I desire is to have some analyst come on and tell me why this last loss is actually a good sign for the future of my team, or how it can all be blamed on poor officiating. Even when I know something is true, I don’t find that that knowledge affects my desire for the information.

The opposite is true, too. When my team wins, I’ll watch hours of ESPN coverage. I’ll tune in to the cognitive wasteland that is sports talk radio. I can’t get enough: tell me more of what I want to hear. When the Heat won last year’s NBA Championship, I stayed up until the wee hours listening to the talking heads say the exact same thing over and over again. It was what I wanted to hear.

We tune out the things that we don’t want to hear, even when they’re the truth. Most perversely, we tune out the things we don’t want to hear, even when they will save our lives! The Gospel, i.e. the Good News, is just that: good. But we tune it out. We ignore it. We change the channel. We don’t want to hear it, because it counteracts our most cherished “truth”: that we are in control. The fact that it’s the truth doesn’t matter one iota: we don’t want it. What we eat up, the thing that we’ll stay up until the wee hours listening to, the thing that we can’t get enough of, is the Law. The fact that it is an accusation that will inevitably lead to our death isn’t a problem…it sounds so sweet to our ears! “You’ll be judged by the content of your character.” “God helps those who help themselves.” “What goes around comes around.” Preach it!

Mockingbird exists to counteract this kind of preaching; the preaching that comes from the world’s pulpit. The Gospel, despite its truth, must break through our barriers, through our channel changing, through the fingers we have jammed into our ears. We’ll sing the same song over and over again: It’s not up to you. You’re not in control. You’ll be judged by the character of another: Jesus Christ the righteous. God helps those who cannot help themselves. What comes around (salvation) is infinitely better than what goes around (sin). We’ll preach that.

———————

With that, my time as Sports Editor of Mockingbird will come to an end. As some of you will already know, I’m off to serve as Editor-in-Chief of LIBERATE, the resource ministry of Tullian Tchividjian, a ministry that seeks to proclaim the same Gospel message as Mockingbird: God’s inexhaustible love to an exhausted world. I will continue to be a some-time contributor to Mockingbird, how could I not? Mockingbird has made me a better writer, a better thinker, and a better Christian, if such a thing existed. Thank you for all for reading, for your comments and support, and I’ll see you soon.

Read More » n+1 has a new piece on the changing landscape of the “sellout,” and the assertions of authenticity that have been re-shaped in the relationship between art and commerce. Evan Kindley is writing a review on a few books in the topic, one of which is spotlighted, by Timothy Taylor, The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. Going back to the origin of music being used for advertising ends, the book archives the radio-days of musicians crafting Lucky Strike jingles, all the way to the  visual age of musicians having their own songs (and personas) implanted into the product’s identity. This began the age of 70s and 80s “punk nihilist” and 90s grunge sellout talk, where advertising execs–just look at Wayne’s World–got the reputation of being soulless soul-suckers, and success–financial or otherwise–was antithetical to the band or artist you knew you loved.

Kindley, with help from Taylor and the other authors in question, seem to make the point that things are changing in light of the MP3 era of music-exchange and commercial enterprise. It seems that what had always been the age of exchange (money for records), where the listeners had loaded guns of expectation for quality and originality, has been turned upon itself. The costless  music we’ve come to expect have become the means by which artists have turned the gun on the audience–blaming their Outback Steakhouse re-rendition on the fact that no one cares enough to buy. So goes the cycle of accusation, I suppose.

But what I found most interesting is the old notion that authenticity is often wrongly expressed away from consumerism, in an inverse relationship with consumerism. Taylor and Kindley point this out as a false authenticity we seem to be growing out of in the age of “free music,” that somehow, with Taylor Swift’s “22″ on Diet Coke commercials, and country music making explicit references to the Coors Light “mountains turning blue,” that we’re coming to the recognition that we are consumers, that we consume, that the “storm” of the Internet has made artist and audience complicit consumers all alike.

In February 2007, attendees of an of Montreal show at Emo’s in Austin, Texas held up a homemade Outback banner and chanted “SELL OUT” at the band. (According to one online report, Barnes had security throw the troublemakers out of the club; others claim he merely lectured them from the stage.) In November of the same year, of Montreal participated in another commercial, this time for T-Mobile, providing the occasion for a manifesto written by Barnes for the website Stereogum, with the Baudrillardian title “Selling Out Isn’t Possible.” “The pseudo-nihilistic punk rockers of the ’70s created an impossible code . . . which no one can actually live by,” Barnes wrote. “The idea that anyone who attempts to do anything commercial is a sell out is completely out of touch with reality. . . . I think it is important to face reality.” Facing reality, for Barnes, meant accepting that, “[a]s sad as it may seem, one of the few ways most indie bands can make any money whatsoever is by selling a song to a commercial. Very very few bands make enough money from album sales or tour revenue to enable themselves to quit their day job.”

Next time you see a commercial with one of your favorite bands’ songs in it, just tell yourself, “cool, a band I really like made some money and now I can probably look forward to a few more records from them.” It’s as simple as that.

In 2007, this line of reasoning still came off as slightly cagey and defensive, but it has rapidly become the party line for musicians, fans, and advertising executives alike, all of them looking for somewhere to stand in the rapidly shifting post-Internet economic landscape of the 21st-century music industry. Barnes’s screed can be read as a founding document of a new pop era, in which it’s the musicians who get righteously angry at the fans on the subject of commercialism. The old complaint, in which artists are scorned for abandoning the communities that nurtured them and ascending into the corporate empyrean, has been replaced by a new one, in which artists rage at those same communities for not lifting them up high enough to keep body and soul together.

It’s in this confused, poisonous atmosphere that the stigma against the advertising industry has begun to break down. The taboo itself isn’t ancient (though it’s certainly older than “the pseudo-nihilistic punk rockers of the ’70s” that Barnes scapegoats); as the musicologist Timothy D. Taylor shows in The Sounds of Capitalism, the links between American popular music and advertising are longstanding.

Still, the concept of “selling out” had plenty of cultural currency well into the early 2000s, and not only in the nascent “indie” world. (As Taylor reports, high-profile licensing deals like Nike’s infamous use of the Beatles’ “Revolution” in 1987 stirred up plenty of righteous anger among baby boomers.) If anything, this critical discourse was overdeveloped in the post-Sixties counterculture, whose members had a tendency to act as if the real problem with capitalism was that it worked too well (insidiously controlling hapless consumers, and corrupting the purity of producers) rather than not working well enough (failing to provide an equal distribution of wealth and other goods). The preoccupation with “selling out,” in other words, played into the larger dynamic of what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have described as the “artistic critique” of capitalism, which focuses on the evils of commodification and inauthenticity at the expense of those of inequality and atomization.

…Taylor is certainly right to observe that the relationship between the advertising and music industries matters today in a new way. Let’s leave aside the actual influence corporate advertising has on today’s musicians or music culture; its status in the arguments we have about music has certainly changed. In recent years the pendulum of shame has begun to swing back the other way: where once fans routinely accused greedy musicians of selling out (or each other of enjoying “sell-out” music), now musicians counter-accuse consumers of abandoning the market economy, forcing them into the arms of corporate benefactors. In such a scenario, Taylor points out, cultural intermediaries like “advertising agency creative workers appear to be heroes of a sort.” They have the melancholy Protestant commitment to “creativity” that Max Weber thought 19th-century Americans had toward production per se: “Theirs is a way of attempting to survive the unprecedented voracity of capitalism and the iron cage of rationalization that accompanies it, even as they serve capitalism.” The hip young sophisticates who work at advertising today have not given up the basic countercultural faith that commerce and art are incompatible, but they have tempered it with the realist proviso that artists, like everybody else, need to get paid somehow. In Taylor’s words, they “still have no tolerance for what they view as commercial music . . . . At the same time, however, they have no compunction about using this music for commercial purposes.” Advertising, then, is not an illicit way for musicians to enrich themselves but one of the few viable ways for them to secure support: not a ladder on the rung to transcendence but the only port in a storm.

…The music industry as we knew it, with its shaky ad hoc compromises between art and commerce, is never coming back, but that’s no reason to resign ourselves to resentment or bad faith: we may yet look back on this time as the era of the emergence of a new politics of music. “The story of MPEG,” Sterne writes, “poses standards as an as-yet-unresolved issue of political representation in the development of new communications technologies.” The standards for the technologies that will shape music listening for the next fifty years are being set today; if we want them to represent us, we will have to find ways to make our presence and interests known to the people who write code and broker distribution deals as well as those who produce and consume music. (Who knows what form this might take? Occupy Spotify has a ring to it.) Lowery is certainly right to point out that Emily White’s generation—and not hers alone—has “value[d] the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself.” But perhaps the two are no longer extricable, if they ever were. And we have no reason not to hear ourselves in all of them.

Which is not to imply that a portion of…

Read More » What a rare and inspiring privilege it was to be with poet and author Christian Wiman last week. I for one am still reeling–don’t know how it could have possibly been any richer. Thankfully, like his poetry in Every Riven Thing and his prose in My Bright Abyss, the talks he gave here in Charlottesville defy distillation. They require real attention–and while one might expect as much from an artist of his caliber and quality, still, the anticipation of poetic brilliance doesn’t make it any less arresting when you actually experience it.

Which is not to imply that a portion of the wisdom and substance wasn’t plain enough to be gleaned in the moment, or that certain phrases didn’t immediately lodge themselves in my brain (“banqueting on oblivion”, “anti-devotional devotions”, “sumptuous destitution”, “foreclosing on an inspiration”, to name just a few). But there is too much behind these words to do them any kind justice in a short blog post. So I’m not going to try; we contribute enough to the “pandemonium of blab” as it is! Instead, like the poems which he wove so seamlessly into his presentations, these talks beg to be revisited over and over again, worked through and absorbed and re-absorbed. I know I have already done so multiple times. As a warm-up, here’s a beautiful Christological paragraph from the “Varieties of Quiet” chapter in My Bright Abyss:

“Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary, but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a shard of glass in your gut. Christ is God crying ‘I am here’, and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends and degrades you, here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God. To walk through the fog of God toward the clarity of Christ is difficult because of how unlovely, how “ungodly” that clarity often turns out to be.” (p 121)

Secondly, the remarkable poem (of praise) that Chris recited at the beginning of his talk was “The City Limits” by A.R. Ammons:

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

A few of his own poems that Chris recites in the talks below include:

• For D
• From a Window
• Hammer Is The Prayer
• My Stop Is Grand

Finally, the recordings of the talks in question:

1. “And I Was Alive: Faith in a Faithless Time”

You may download this recording by clicking here.

2. Question and Answer

You may download this recording by clicking here.

P.S. Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for an exclusive interview with the man himself.

P.P.S. Why would God care about England?! Ha.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Awaits alike the inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

-Excerpt from Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

The tower of Babel story is a baffling one. You know the drill – people want to “make a name for themselves” by making a cool building, a celebration of early civilization, and then God decides to topple the house…

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Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

-Excerpt from Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

The tower of Babel story is a baffling one. You know the drill – people want to “make a name for themselves” by making a cool building, a celebration of early civilization, and then God decides to topple the house of cards, like a capricious kid, by giving everyone different languages to speak. The weird thing here is that in the Genesis account, there’s none of the usual attribution of pride or sinfulness the Old Testament uses to justify divine ‘No’s. Why does God disperse the people and confuse their language? The most direct explanation the Genesis account offers is that “nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” Barth wrote, “We can permit ourselves to be more romantic than the romanticists and more humanistic than the humanists.” God’s reaction to Babel in this story is the among the Bible’s passages that are most affirming of human potential and capability – they (we) can do anything.

But this freedom is ambiguous – again, it is not explicitly sin which invites God’s disruptive intervention, but (taking the passage at face value) it is the potential for human flourishing itself.

The act of Creation is not an act of power. It is an abdication… it is a kingdom from which God has withdrawn. God, having renounced being its king, can only enter it as beggar.

-Simone Weil, ‘Are We Struggling for Justice?’

But God’s abdication here is somehow incomplete – he retains power as Judge throughout the Bible, up until the point when “all judgment is given to the Son”, but this is power of a different kind, power exercised, on the surface at least, in rivalry of human beings, in response to a threat as one of the greatest works of culture in human history was nearing completion. The competitive facet of God is here reminiscent of the Greeks – the gift of fire by Prometheus, enabling the boundless human potential for creation or destruction, made them too powerful for the gods’ liking.

If creation is an abdication, and God withdraws to let us manage our affairs, what does this act mean, which is neither one of deliverance nor moral judgement?

God in almost-fearfulness, in this bizarre passage, creates a language barrier to permanently check human accomplishment (it almost gives light credence, imo, to some Christians’ apocalyptic terror of Esperanto). 

But, since this barrier is contrived and certainly surmountable, we are constantly in a state of attempting to do so. The lectionary at a Church in town serendipitously paired this passage with graduation weekend; the messages couldn’t be more at odds. Esperanto aside, our lives are filled with attempts to surmount all barriers to achievement, to making a name for ourselves. And, despite Christianity’s low anthropology, the Babel story affirms the real possibility of worldly achievement.

And yet the scattering is for the good of humanity; possibility is almost always an enemy to living peacefully or contentedly, cultural achievement is univocally declared questionable. And this is different than a curmudgeonly Christianity’s moral distrust of culture, because nowhere does the story indicate that Babel was necessarily an evil. Only that, for some mysterious reason, it’s for the best that things didn’t play out like that:

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

A certain low-scope creatureliness is affirmed here; the achievement that disdains merely short and simple annals is hubris, born of possibility – “nothing they propose will now be impossible.”

That cultural thriving is neither innately good nor bad, theologically, is absolutely central to any healthy cultural engagement. Babel doesn’t so much destroy human achievement as refuse to allow us to be too self-impressed. The pall of mistrust cast on human possibility in the story is, in fact, the only thing that allows for achievement or civilization or whatever else to be engaged without an agenda, and agenda-less-ness is the telltale characteristic of love.

Genesis tells the story like God is threatened by Babel, and it was cultural achievement – the pursuit of peace in a ‘hotspot’ of war – which would provide the opportunity for God to submit to human power, to enter as Weil’s beggar and make the abdication complete. And absence, of course, implies greater presence: Christ disappearing into the sky from Galilee so the Spirit can come into the world, power made perfect in weakness, life in death.

And, as a benefit on the side, a freedom from moral concerns, from building Babel for glory or refraining out of piety. The tower did not reach to the heavens, but God reached down, and only with that freedom from morality can anything in culture be affirmed, and truly affirmed in absence of agendas or intentions.

Read More » Vampire Weekend has often been accused of making rather frivolous music that appeals mainly to hipsters, and, in many respects, that accusation is true of their first two albums, Vampire Weekend and Contra. Yet, I personally think that criticizing a band for writing about what they know, especially early in their career, has little merit. You never know when a band is going to take the next step and begin to touch on bigger ideas and struggles than, say, the use of the oxford comma or drinking horchata. On Modern Vampires of the City, the band retains its quirky, anything goes brand of indie pop, but the album abounds with weightier and more universal themes. In comparison to Vampire Weekend’s first two albums, Modern Vampires is full of maturity and depth, as lead singer Ezra Koenig explores death and God in his lyrics with an intensity not seen on their previous albums. The music reflects this added depth, too, as the album sounds more expansive than the band’s first two records. Each song is instrumentally and vocally packed, making for an impeccably layered album that abounds with creative energy.

 “It’s been twenty years and no one’s told the truth,” laments Koenig on the album’s opening track, “Obvious Bicycle,” setting the stage for rest of Modern Vampires and its preoccupation with truth and doubt. Beautifully written, “Obvious Bicycle” transforms throughout its four-minute running time, beginning with just the consistent beat of a drum and piano, before hitting the chorus where Koenig’s vocals are buoyed on a sea of background vocals that resound as if in a cathedral. The bridge of “Obvious Bicycle” marks the first time on Modern Vampires where chambered vocals (sounding almost like Gregorian chant) burst into the musical background, a re-occurring sound over the course of the album. Carrying on the theme of truth and doubt, “Unbelievers” immediately follows “Obvious Bicycle,” and injects a shot of energy into the album with its pounding bass drum and quick tempo. As its title suggests, “Unbelievers” focuses on questions of belief and faith, offering up some of the album’s most intriguing lines: “If I’m born again, I know that the world will disagree. Want a little grace, but who’s going to say a little grace for me?” The questions that Koenig asks during “Unbelievers” don’t get answered until later in the album, but they provide an interesting thematic background to the beginning of the album.

The first half of Modern Vampires deals with big questions of truth and doubt, placing those questions within a sense of mortality that pervades the album. “Step,” the album’s third track, a slow-burning, harpsichord-love letter to music, straightforwardly confronts death’s specter: “We know the true death, the true way of all flesh. Everyone’s dying, but girl, you’re not old yet.” The cautious, contemplative “Step” transitions into the raucous romp of “Diane Young,” and while their music may be quite different, death is still the focus. “Diane Young,” a fun spin on “dying young,” reflects this even in its music, a clear nod back to 1950s era rock’n’roll, right down to Koenig’s repeated use of the word “baby.” The final verse of “Diane Young” provides one way of dealing with mortality: “Nobody knows what the future holds and it’s bad enough just getting old. Live my life in self-defense, you know I love the past, cause I hate suspense.” Completing the triad of songs in the first half that blatantly address issues of death, “Don’t Lie” offers a different take on death than “Diane Young.” Appropriately, “Don’t Lie” opens with a haunting organ and echoing drums, creating a sacred space for the song’s lyrics: “Don’t lie. I want him to know God’s loves die young. Are you ready to go?” Musically, “Don’t Lie” is one of my favorites from the album, as it takes on almost an orchestral feel from its midpoint, which gives the song a sense of grandeur appropriate for the subject matter it is exploring. Koenig’s lyrics in the chorus, which often subtly change, show an acute awareness of how death and mortality can affect everyday life: “Does it bother you? The low click of a ticking clock. There’s a lifetime/headstone right in front of you and everyone I know.” Here, Koenig suggests that it is a matter of perspective whether or not we treat the present as a lifetime of possibilities or a portent of eventual death and decay.

Modern Vampires spends its second half searching for answers to the questions posed on the first half of the album, and arrives at some interesting conclusions by the time the album comes to a close. Conjuring up obvious religious images, “Everlasting Arms” is one of the most profoundly spiritual songs I’ve heard this year, as Koenig’s lyrics vacillate between faith and doubt, often within the same line. With repeated refrains and a sporadic organ, “Everlasting Arms” reminds me of a hymn, even though its lyrics are the uncertain ramblings of broken man. In that regard, perhaps it is a perfect hymn: “I hummed the Dies Irae, you played the Hallelujah. Leave me to my cell, don’t leave me in my cell.” Invoking a 13^th century hymn about God’s Day of Wrath in a pop song is a bold move, but on an album consumed with analyzing these contradictions and paradoxes it comes across as a powerful moment. In my estimation, the album’s clearest answer to the paradoxes of faith comes on “Ya Hey,” a gloriously weird song that addresses God, receiving a cryptic message in response: “Through the fire and through the flames, you won’t even say your name. Only I am that I am.” On “Ya Hey,” all the questions are met by the voice of the burning bush, as the choral background vocals strive to create a similar holy ground experience. To Ezra Koenig as to Moses, I am that I am becomes the answer to the paradoxical questions of faith.

But, there are a few questions that are answered on Modern Vampires of the City, and one in particular that I want to return to as I end. On “Unbelievers,” Koenig asks, “Who’s going to say a little grace for me?” The answer comes on “Ya Hey”: “I can’t help but feel that you see the mistakes, but you let it go.” The mistakes, the problems, the fears, the insecurities, the evil acts of man, are let go by I am that I am who speaks grace into the world. To this idea, Koenig poses another question at the end of the chorus to “Ya Hey”: “But who could ever live that way?” If you’ll permit me, I’ll offer my own answer to that query: no one can. That’s what makes it grace. Vampire Weekend explores these questions with their characteristic wit and musical creativity, but the answers they provide are what will keep me coming back to Modern Vampires of the City, one of the best albums of the year so far.

It’s a pastoral meditation on realism and hope, geared a little from Eric Rohmer’s “political” movie of 1993, “The Tree, The Mayor, and The Mediatheque”.

This cast also gives me a chance to introduce ‘George’ to my listeners. He’s been with me since the 2nd of April. I christened him ‘George’ on the basis of a “Way Out” episode from long ago, entitled “Dissolve to Black”. My friend George, however, is nicer than the original ‘George’.

Anyway, I hope you like the music, hope you like the movie,…

Read More » Episode 142: Girl Can’t Help It

I’d like this one to be considered avant-garde. Like Journey.

It’s a pastoral meditation on realism and hope, geared a little from Eric Rohmer’s “political” movie of 1993, “The Tree, The Mayor, and The Mediatheque”.

This cast also gives me a chance to introduce ‘George’ to my listeners. He’s been with me since the 2nd of April. I christened him ‘George’ on the basis of a “Way Out” episode from long ago, entitled “Dissolve to Black”. My friend George, however, is nicer than the original ‘George’.

Anyway, I hope you like the music, hope you like the movie, and I hope you like George!

Episode 143: Old Man River

Here’s a word from our sponsor — George!

It’s a sort of P.S. to Episode 142, and relates to the character of God as “like an ever rolling stream” (Watts). God, i.e., George, floats us down His “Old Man River”, and sometimes we fall right off the boat. Maybe most of the time.

So I look here at a very specific thing, which is the recent output of that celestial blessing known as Los Straitjackets. And Behold: Something New! (“Something Better Beginning”)

Their music’s really become new. It’s a huge encouragement to anyone who’s ever been thrown off the boat.

The cast references two recent songs performed by Los Straitjackets with Sarah Borges, and also their newest — or almost newest — single, “Friday on my Mind”. Podcast 143 also references the second movie version of the musical “Showboat”, which came out in 1936 and was directed by James Whale. Think “Bride of Frankenstein” and you’re home. LUV U.

Read More » 1. First off, a timely rejoinder to our many social-media-is-making-us-lonely posts from Paul Miller on The Verge, entitled “I’m Still Here: Back Online After A Year Without Internet”. As the title suggests, Miller unplugged for a solid year, partly as an assignment to try to discover how technology, and the Internet in particular, had affected him (and us) over time. He reports that while the experience was initially incredibly freeing, he eventually found himself right back where he started, i.e. his new habits became just as constraining as the old ones. In theological terms, you might say that Paul’s story is an indelible testament to the fact that one cannot escape the law (or the human condition) by merely changing one’s circumstances. The very thing we once experienced as freedom (at conversion) can often turn into its opposite over time. Technology may exacerbate our tendencies and compulsions–it may make certain appetites easier to indulge and certain gifts more difficult to cultivate–it may even succeed in changing our behavior to an extent, but it doesn’t have the power to purify or corrupt a heart. Turns out that it is not the things outside a man which defile him, ht BPZ:

Everything started out great, let me tell you. I did stop and smell the flowers. My life was full of serendipitous events: real life meetings, frisbee, bike rides, and Greek literature. With no clear idea how I did it, I wrote half my novel, and turned in an essay nearly every week to The Verge. In one of the early months my boss expressed slight frustration at how much I was writing, which has never happened before and never happened since. I lost 15 pounds without really trying. I bought some new clothes. People kept telling me how good I looked, how happy I seemed…

Then, for some reason, even going to the post office sounded like work. I began to dread the letters and almost resent them. As it turned out, a dozen letters a week could prove to be as overwhelming as a hundred emails a day. And that was the way it went in most aspects of my life. A good book took motivation to read, whether I had the internet as an alternative or not. Leaving the house to hang out with people took just as much courage as it ever did… By late 2012, I’d learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet.

It’s hard to say exactly what changed. I guess those first months felt so good because I felt the absence of the pressures of the internet. My freedom felt tangible. But when I stopped seeing my life in the context of “I don’t use the internet,” the offline existence became mundane, and the worst sides of myself began to emerge…

What I do know is that I can’t blame the internet, or any circumstance, for my problems. I have many of the same priorities I had before I left the internet: family, friends, work, learning. And I have no guarantee I’ll stick with them when I get back on the internet — I probably won’t, to be honest. But at least I’ll know that it’s not the internet’s fault. I’ll know who’s responsible…

2. On the other side of the equation, John Lanchester produced some reflections on Google Glass and other so-called “wearable computing” devices for the London Review of Books. As you may know, Glass is capable of recording everything one says or does while wearing it. Your own personal Big Brother in other words, an omniscience which delivers the opposite of the empowerment it might promise, ht CE:

“The whole point of these devices – the reason they work, insofar as they do – is they make you self-conscious about how you’re behaving, and prompt you to behave differently. They notice your being virtuous, where no one else notices (or cares), and so prompt you to be more so. Being self-conscious about how well you’re sleeping surely can’t help you sleep…

The cruder and more obvious problem with Glass is less to do with the user’s self-engagement, and self-withdrawal, and self-whatever, and more to do with the effect on the rest of us. Imagine a world in which anyone around you can be recording anything you say, filming anything you do. We already live in a version of that world, of course – especially in Britain, global capital of the CCTV camera. But you can see a camera or a phone or a tape recorder when it’s held up in front of you. Glass is different. William Gibson tried on a pair briefly at a conference, and tweeted: ‘Expect Google Glass to be reworked into less obvious, more trad spectacles, sunglasses etc, for covert use.’ A racing certainty, I would have thought… It’s hard to get one’s head around the disruptive potential of this omnipresent recording. At the end of an hour’s general chat in a newspaper office the other day, the conversation turned to Glass, and we all replayed the talk in our heads, editing out the bits we wouldn’t have said if it had been possible someone present had been recording everything. The conclusion was we’d have managed about five minutes’ small talk about the weather, followed by a 55-minute silence.

3. Next, as Ethan alluded to in passing last week, Kim Wong Keltner’s Tiger Babies Strike Back, has just hit the scene, and it is exactly what you might think: a first person account of the devastation that Perfectionist Parenting can produce. But it would be of limited consequence if it weren’t accompanied–rather serendipitously–by a new psychology study of “400 Chinese American families in the Bay Area, which seemed to show that children of Tiger Parents had both poorer emotional health and lower GPAs than those of parents who embraced warmer and fuzzier child-rearing strategies.” The correlation to certain attitudes about/responses to religious legalism are uncanny. The Wall Street Journal reports, ht RT:

“All this chasing of straight As, this pushing, pushing, pushing for academic excellence, in a lot of cases, it makes kids start to think their parents only care about who they are on paper,” says Keltner. “And ultimately, they may just decide, ‘If nothing is ever going to please you, why should I even try?’”

[The book includes] Constant. Pressure. To. Succeed. Academically. Do better than your siblings. Do better than your classmates. If no one else is around to serve as a handy rival, do better than you did the week before. And when you’ve reached the theoretical maxima of 100%…do extra work in hopes of encouraging the teacher to add underscores and an exclamation point to the 100%!

“[Shame] actually may be the key to why some of these kids are doing well scholastically,” says [Univ. of Texas psychology professor Su Yeong] Kim. “They may not be close to their parents, but they’re being constantly reminded of the sacrifices they’ve made, and of their filial obligations to bring honor to the family.”

As a result, they may end up succeeding academically. But for some, like Keltner, that can come at the price of self-esteem and psychological well-being. “I got good grades just to get my parents off my back,” she says. “I got top test scores, but I was never encouraged to make connections with other people. And I never felt like I could separate myself from them: They would always say, you’re a part of me, what you do reflects on me.”

4. While we’re on the subject of legalism (and shame), Anthony Bradley’s take on one of its more seductive current Christian guises, “The New Legalism: Missional, Radical, Narcissistic, and Shamed”, struck me as remarkably sound, ht KW:

The combination of anti-suburbanism with new categories like “missional” and “radical” has positioned a generation of youth and young adults to experience an intense amount of shame for simply being ordinary Christians who desire to love God and love their neighbors (Matt 22:36-40). In fact, missional, radical Christianity could easily be called “the new legalism.” A few decades ago, an entire generation of Baby Boomers walked away from traditional churches to escape the legalistic moralism of “being good” but what their Millennial children received in exchange, in an individualistic American Christian culture, was shame-driven pressure to be awesome and extraordinary young adults expected to tangibly make a difference in the world immediately. But this cycle of reaction and counter-reaction, inaugurated by the Baby Boomers, does not seem to be producing faithful young adults. Instead, many are simply burning out.

5. Of course, reactivity is not just limited to the religious world–and it doesn’t get much more outrageous than Gawker’s recent report, “Georgia Man Burns Down Neighbors House Over Unkempt Lawn.”

6. On a completely unrelated note, The Atlantic uses the recent hubbub over David Bowie’s new video to revisit that classic of sacrilegious art, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ”, and I was caught off guard–in a good way–by writer Noah Berlatsky’s observations about that controversial piece. I know this isn’t the most appetizing subject, but the closing line is worth the disgust, ht SMZ:

Folks who have never seen the photograph tend to assume, I think, that “Piss Christ” was simply a provocation… The actual image, though, is surprisingly ambiguous. The liquid appears, not green, but red; and the light going through the urine creates a kind of halo around the crucifix. While the title makes it clear that Serrano is mocking Catholicism, the image also suggests that there is something there that the mockery can’t reach. Christ triumphs in his defilement—which seems like a summation of, rather than a repudiation of, the Christian message.

7. In sports, get the tissues ready if you plan to watch ESPN’s story on Landon Powell, a catcher for one of The Mets AAA farm teams. While the network can’t seem to resist a little Oprah-ization, the statement at the 13 minute mark from Landon’s wife Allison is as moving (and credible) a testimony of counter-intuitive Christian joy as one is likely to find, ht WK.

8. As graduation weekend arrives for many schools around the country, the By Way of Beauty blog imagines what novelist Walker Percy might have had to say about David Foster Wallace’s ur-graduation speech, “This Is Water–Or Is It?”

9. Humor-wise, Louis CK’s instant classic “Of Course But Maybe” bit from his recent special Oh My God may be a tad too colorful to post on here comfortably, but the insight and hilarity is undeniable. Elsewhere, the Wes Anderson Bible tmblr is worth checking out, the tagline of which reads “If Wes Anderson wrote the Bible, it would sound like this.” And if the whole “rise of funny women” angle seemed a bit too transparently designed to sell magazines (and boost ratings) when it was initially trotted out a couple of years ago, it is now simply a description of reality, and not just because Frances Ha came out this week. As far as I’m concerned, the three best comedies on television this Spring have been Veep, Happy Endings (sob) and New Girl–all of which are anchored by incredibly talented comediennes–and the highpoint of HBO’s Family Tree pilot was definitely the puppet-handed Nina Conti, as well as this hilarious little gem:

Finally, we were beyond privileged to host esteemed poet and writer Christian Wiman here in Charlottesville this week. It is not often that one gets to spend time with such a great artist and man–I’m not sure how he could have possibly given us more to think about or digest. So an enormous thank-you to everyone who helped make “Wiman Week 2013″ such a blast. The recordings of his talk will be up next week, and we hope to post our interview with him by the end of the month. Stay tuned. For those who can’t wait, I don’t think we posted the wonderful profile that the Texas Monthly did of him recently. Or the fascinating little Q&A one of our local weeklies ran.

Also, Mockingbird sent out its big Spring newsletter and appeal today. If you would like to find out more about how you can support what we are doing, please sign up for our mailing list. We need your help! (She, on the other hand, seems to be doing just fine…:)

We have written several pieces on Charles Schulz’s Peanuts here before, and in particular on Robert L. Short’s prophetic interpretation in his The Gospel According to Peanuts (1965) here, here, and here. Both Peanuts in general and Short’s book in particular have played meaningful roles in my life ever since my conversion to Christian faith. In fact, I recently reread Short’s very important (and Mockingbird-esque) first chapter, “The Church and the Arts.” I found that he gives us—as Thornton Wilder called it—some “new persuasive words  for defaced or degraded ones” about Pentecost and the Holy Spirit’s work in the arts and…

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We have written several pieces on Charles Schulz’s Peanuts here before, and in particular on Robert L. Short’s prophetic interpretation in his The Gospel According to Peanuts (1965) here, here, and here. Both Peanuts in general and Short’s book in particular have played meaningful roles in my life ever since my conversion to Christian faith. In fact, I recently reread Short’s very important (and Mockingbird-esque) first chapter, “The Church and the Arts.” I found that he gives us—as Thornton Wilder called it—some “new persuasive words  for defaced or degraded ones” about Pentecost and the Holy Spirit’s work in the arts and the Church today.

In the spirit of Pentecost coming once again this Sunday, here are some highlights from that first chapter, in which Short explains his own project of interpreting the art of Peanuts:

Far too often the Church finds itself in the trap of attempting to explain its position in a language that is itself not meaningful. When Linus asks his mother why he cannot ‘slug’ Lucy, who has taken his book of stories, his mother answers, ‘That’s just one of those things I can’t explain.’ But Lucy has an explanation: ‘Listen, dope!’ she tells Linus, with her fist in his face, ‘If you slug me, I’ll slug you right back!!’ ‘Never mind, Mom,’ says Linus after silently watching Lucy turn and walk away with his book; ‘It’s just been explained to me in a language I can understand.’ The Church’s missionaries to its ‘cultured despisers’ need to be as well acquainted with the current languages of culture as the Church’s missionaries to foreign lands are acquainted with the languages of the areas into which they are sent. (p. 7) …

Art, just because of its subtlety and indirectness, has a way of sneaking around ‘mental blocks’ and getting to the heart of the matter where it is capable of deeply and literally ‘moving’—even the most immovable—men and women. (p. 8) …

Therefore if there is some truth in art (and it must follow, as the night the day, that the greater the art the more truthful it will be) that the Christian observer can point to, he can then by this means speak a word to his brother who might not be willing to listen in any other way. The artist, then, is like the man who is ‘speaking in strange tongues,’ to use Paul’s language. The ability to speak in tongues Paul saw as one of the great ‘gifts of the Spirit’ within the Church. For to one was given one gift, ‘to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues’ (1 Cor. 12:10), and so on. But as Paul also pointed out, no one will be able to understand these tongues ‘if there is no one to interpret’ (1 Cor. 14:28). Thus, the Church, rather than always being annoyed by the arts, should encourage a vanguard of men and women to be interpreters of these tongues, or arts, which can act as truly provocative ‘conversation pieces’ between the Church and the culture in which the Church finds itself. (pp. 11-12)

This is a pretty good description of the Mockingbird project, too. As our mission statement reads: “Mockingbird is a ministry that seeks to connect the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life in fresh and down-to-earth ways”. Forgive me for being boastful, but I can’t help noticing important parallels between what Short did nearly 50 years ago, what we at Mockingbird are trying to do today, and how the Holy Spirit was at work at Pentecost back then.

I am growing more and more convinced that not only organizations such as this one but the Church more generally, as Short argues, urgently needs to be interpreting these “strange tongues” for the sake of hardened hearts, blocked intellects, and heavy laden souls and the Good News we might proclaim to them–starting with our own. Such a vanguard of interpreters would surely be something of a new Pentecost, if one could conscionably say such a thing. Or perhaps with Thornton Wilder, we could just call it a rhetorical revival: “The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem—new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.” Surely Short would agree!

Bonus material: Jean Schulz, Charles Schulz’s widow, recently wrote this fascinating blog post about the nature of an important artistic shift detected in his Peanuts corpus, ht DZ. She cites Stephan Pastis, creator of Pearls before Swine, who first noticed that this shift takes place with one particular comic strip in 1954:

So for the first time in Peanuts, you see real pathos, something which would give the strip its depth. In terms of tone, it is also groundbreaking. In an era when every strip had to be either an adventure strip or a slapstick humor strip, here is a humor strip that is not funny. Boldly not funny. It’s just sad. And moreover, it’s a child being sad. That’s a real departure for both Peanuts and probably most other strips on the comics page.

How then might we interpret the strange tongue of this comic strip? I venture to say that what we find in Charlie Brown is a void or lack of fulfillment that no train set, not even the big fancy one like his friend’s, could ever fill. Like us, when he finally gets the toy he wants, he will be dissatisfied soon again (Matthew 6:19-21). That empty place in our souls can only be filled with the saving grace of God found in Jesus Christ. On that note, and in the spirit of Pentecost, praise Him for this love, and for Schulz and other great artists, for their strange tongues, and for the gift of those like Short who interpret these artistic tongues for us so we might better understand “the mighty works of God.” (Acts 2:11)

While we’re on the subject of the show, if you’re at all like me and…

Read More » Many moons ago, Mockingbird put together and distributed a little teaching series called “The Gospel According to The Office.” When we made the transition to the new site a couple of years ago, it somehow fell through the cracks. The show’s finale seemed like as good a time as any to put it back into circulation. Like the show itself, we don’t vouch for how it may have dated–but it sure seemed like a good idea at the time! You can download it by clicking here.

While we’re on the subject of the show, if you’re at all like me and didn’t catch the last couple seasons (and are checking back in for these final episodes), you may have missed the surprisingly powerful instance of grace in the recent episode “Living the Dream”. It involves Angela, the cranky accountant who has served as the office moralist since the show began. Through a series of unfortunate events, her Pharisaical facade is finally ripped away, at which point her nemesis, Oscar–whom she has consistently mistreated (and vice versa)–shows her unexpected mercy. Having hit rock bottom at last, Oscar’s gesture allows Angela not only to accept but confess what is really eating away at her, and their interaction is genuinely touching. Fast forward to the closing five minutes if you’d rather not watch the entire thing, ht HS:

A Few Bonus Tracks:

“…God’s grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver…. From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can “just forgive” the perpetrator…. But when you forgive, that…

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“Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.” –Henri Nouwen

“…God’s grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver…. From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can “just forgive” the perpetrator…. But when you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.” – Tim Keller

Currently, there are two people whom I have, consciously, not forgiven. I know I haven’t forgiven them because whenever their names come randomly (or not-so-randomly) to my mind, that old angered wound festers inside of me again and I go through the litany of things I would love to say to them—whether I would really say it to them or not in reality. I get bent out of shape and worked up and nasty just thinking about their “crimes” and they, wherever they may be, know not of the ill will I wish of them. They remain unharmed by my faulty telekinetic powers of resentment, while, at the same time, I suffer from the internal bleeding caused by my lack of forgiveness. I’m starting to think part of me wants to continue to bleed out as long as I don’t have to face them and/or love them. Loving them requires a denial of what I perceive as my need for justice.

It is in these moments I am reminded of two films which have torn me apart emotionally in their depiction of forgiveness given and received, the cost taken and the grace given: Around the Bend and The Woodsman. Released in 2004, both of these relatively unsung movies find their cinematic resolution of tension in moments of forgiveness. Unlike many of their Hollywood counterparts, the wrongdoing that is being forgiven is not the sympathetic kind; these are visceral and even horrific instances of what can only be called sin–which is precisely why they are so powerful and unsentimental (and also probably why neither did very well at the box office).

The Woodsman is the story of a recently paroled child molester who finds himself confronted by his own unrelenting demons and unforgiving co-workers and cops. Kevin Bacon plays Walter, the quiet and tormented parolee, who, at every turn, is reminded of what he has done and, even more so, who he is. He definitely cannot forgive himself, and no one else seems to be able to either. His brother-in-law, warily, and his female co-worker (and lover), Vicki, even after she finds out the truth about Walter and reveals her own past of molestation at the hands of her brothers, seem to be the only ones who can stand the sight of him. Most people in the film are more akin to Sgt. Lucas (Mos Def), an unrelenting cop, who is dead set on catching Walter in the act again, convinced that he will slip up.

And he nearly does. A shiver runs down my spine just thinking about the scene where Walter is sitting on the park bench with Robin, the young birdwatcher, whom he has set his sights on and followed into the park. When Walter resorts to his old tricks to lure her in, he notices something different in her eyes. She is well aware of what his actions mean. Her father has done similar things and shamed her already. At that point, he is seen, through her eyes, and known for what he truly is. After a lengthy period of tension in the dialogue, both verbal and non-verbal, and the shamed Walter refusing to give in and break this already broken girl, he tells her to leave the park. Robin, in tears at this point, comes over and hugs Walter around the neck, innocently, and walks away. (You can watch it here, though be warned, this is about as heavy as it gets). Both Vicki and Robin, in their own ways in the film, are confronted with the reality of who Walter is, and are able to begin to forgive their victimizers, vicariously, through the love and forgiveness they show toward Walter. As the movie attests, Walter, though far from healed, is changed by these interactions in a profound way.

Around the Bend is the story of the the Lair family. As his dying wish, family patriarch Henry (Michael Caine), sends his son, Turner (Christopher Walken), his grandson, Jason (Josh Lucas), and his great-grandson, Zach, on a journey to resolve buried tension and estrangement in the family. He devises a series of seemingly ludicrous clues, along with a map, which lead the three generations on a trip where they are forced to rehash and heal the familial problems that have lain dormant underneath their relationships (or lack thereof) for many years. With each place these hapless pilgrims visit and each conversation they have, the audience and Jason come closer to the revelation that will define the family dynamics from then on.

The whole movie builds toward the final destination—a humble adobe apartment in Albuquerque, New Mexico—where Turner, broken down, shamed and in tears, reveals his reasons for not being present in Jason’s life. Turner, on drugs, threw his son, Jason, down the stairs of the apartment; the very event that led Jason to have a permanent limp for the rest of his life. Turner’s anguish over his actions led to the estrangement from his own son. He could not look upon him without guilt flooding and drowning him in the process. Jason, after the revelation is made in an intense scene between father and son at the stairway, decides to forgive his father’s terrible transgression.

His forgiveness is shown when Jason takes his dying father, whose kidneys gave out 6 months before, to the place near Mexico—Turner’s original destination when he shows up at the beginning of the movie to “stop by”—where Turner and Jason’s mother, unbeknownst to Jason, consummated their relationship and conceived Jason, i.e. the exact act of sacrificial kindness that Turner, after permanently injuring his son and disappearing from his life, did not deserve according to anyone’s accounting, especially his son’s. In the end, we see that because of this act of forgiveness Jason and his son may be able to let go of their broken past and find some joy and peace in their lives.

I am haunted by these stories when I think on what the Scriptures say about forgiveness. In neither film do those wronged just magically say the words ‘I forgive you’ and everything is suddenly restored. Forgiveness is a costly endeavor. Vicki, Robin and Jason have all suffered the full, tangible weight of the wrongdoing and are somehow given to turn away from revenge and retribution and, instead, love their enemy instead. Indeed, forgiveness happens at the moment when the offender is seen and known for what they are, broken and sinful, and, yet, shown compassion and love in response. Just as Christ’s forgiveness–which came at an enormous cost to himself –showers us, at our worst, with mercy, the forgiveness in these films illustrates the real life implications of that grace in a world full of people who love poorly, including myself.

In other words, I would imagine that every episode proceeds along the same lines as this episode, which features Amy’s Baking Company in Scottsdale, Arizona:

If you don’t have time to watch…

Read More » Until yesterday, I had never watched an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, but, according to its website, here’s how it works: Ramsay, a notoriously mean chef, visits struggling restaurants, observes them, and then tells the owners how to fix their restaurants. Knowing how I usually respond to criticism, I cannot see how this premise ever works. Instead, I would imagine every episode ending in denial, retreat, and, ultimately, violence.

In other words, I would imagine that every episode proceeds along the same lines as this episode, which features Amy’s Baking Company in Scottsdale, Arizona:

If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing now, I would recommend saving this for a time that you do. It is chock-full of theological lessons or (if you are more like me) mockability. To summarize, Amy and Samy met in Las Vegas, where Samy was apparently quite the playboy. They got married and, to take advantage of Amy’s (self-proclaimed) God-given gifts in the kitchen, invested $1 million in their Scottsdale restaurant. The restaurant got some bad reviews on the Internet, which spurred a response from Samy and Amy. Now Samy and Amy feel attacked from all sides and want Gordon Ramsay to come and let everyone know that their restaurant is, in fact, very good.

You can already see the crux of the problem. Samy and Amy want justification. They start by trying to justify themselves in their response to the Internet “haters.” When that doesn’t work, they seek salvation from the outside, in the form of Gordon Ramsay.

But the salvation they seek is not the type of salvation that Ramsay is offering. In his initial visit to the restaurant, Ramsay tastes Amy’s cakes and is extremely complimentary of them. However, when he tries to eat lunch at the restaurant, he immediately identifies numerous problems. Amy prepares all of the food herself. The wait for food is too long. When the food arrives, it isn’t properly prepared. Samy is the only person who uses the computer. The wait staff is not allowed to keep its tips. And, most outrageously, the pasta, which purports to be homemade, is NOT HOMEMADE. As Ramsay relays these criticisms to Samy and the wait staff, he realizes that the criticisms are not being relayed to Amy. Instead, because Amy reacts so poorly to criticism, everyone is afraid to be honest with her.

I’m with Amy on this one. I can’t stand to be criticized. When someone criticizes me, my immediate reaction is to try to figure out what possible psychological defect could cause that person to criticize me. Does the person not understand what I’m doing? Is the person just jealous? Is the person just stupid?

Once Ramsay delivers his criticisms directly to Amy, she goes through all of these phases. She denies the problems. She blames Ramsay for putting too much pressure on her. She lashes out at the staff. Eventually, she shuts down entirely, denying Ramsay’s expertise and refusing to engage with him.

And that is just part one. It gets worse from there. Ultimately, Ramsay gives up and leaves, deciding that Amy’s Baking Company cannot be saved.

Ramsay is right. Amy’s Baking Company cannot be saved by him, because he is not the type of savior that Amy’s Baking Company needs. Amy’s Baking Company is not looking for a savior that will tell it how to get better, that will tell it how to run a better kitchen or cook better food. Amy’s Baking Company is looking for a savior that will embrace it and replace it, that will stand between Amy’s Baking Company and the judgment of the world, that will say, with authority (and a relatively straight face) that “This is my beloved bakery, with whom I am well pleased.”,

Sadly, in the absence of this type of salvation and in the wake of Ramsay’s attempted intervention, Amy’s Baking Company is again attempting justify itself, taking to Facebook, Yelp, and Reddit to attack its detractors. Samy and Amy are refusing to go down without a fight, not quite understanding that the fight is finished and that only by dying to themselves can they, er, bake in freedom.

Read More » We have posted one of Brian Jay Stanley‘s essays before, and heaven knows we’ve posted nearly everything that’s come from the Opinionator’s “Anxiety” series. This one is an unique take. Stanley here is talking about the body-soul/body-mind dualism we still believe today, the gnostic cleanliness we desire over the viscera and guts of nature. We are made anxious, in other words, by the body and the parts of nature’s innards we cannot control. Stanley points to Plato’s discourse of mind over matter, and inverts it: as much as we’d like to lord our big hearts and nervy wits over the nature of things, the miraculous and mysterious (and putrid) order of bodies and earthworms and gravity and cancer have an unintelligible prowess of their own.

Besides this portrayal of the uncontrollable, Stanley is also indicating with body-talk the human anxiety of being uncovered, of an implicit shame at what lies beneath things. And while he ends on the mute vastness of the whole of nature–of the cold calculus whirring behind a computer screen as well as behind a pair of clear eyes–it seems that Stanley is describing a blank space wherein the power of God operates with whispers we cannot bear.

Ever since the first man and woman sewed fig leaves for their loins, human beings have been embarrassed by their bodies. Going to school without clothes is an archetypal nightmare of children. Public nudity is grounds for arrest. Clothing’s purpose is not only to keep us warm but to keep us concealed, shielding us more from shame than rain. Our plight is having a higher standard of beauty than our bodies can match; we are pickier than our maker.

We are especially embarrassed by the inside of our bodies. Mucus, sweat, gas, feces, vomit, urine, saliva, earwax — does any desirable substance emerge from our depths? Whatever comes from inside the body is like a foul messenger from the underworld, whom we fear to encounter. What wife does not wince at the stench of her husband’s morning breath? What teenager is not scandalized to hear his girlfriend on the toilet the first time?

Like our buttocks, breasts and genitals, all our interior regions are private parts. When a nurse pins my X-rays to a hospital wall, I am taken aback. If we blush to be seen without clothes, how much more to be seen without skin? Examining my horror of mutilation — femurs poking from thighs and intestines spilling from abdomens in a war scene, or industrial cattle being ground to ribbons of beef in a meat plant— I find, at root, an instinctive shame and fear of having one’s guts revealed.

Squeamishness about bodies contributes much to the fear of death. Were death merely annihilation — the quiet snuffing out of consciousness — it might almost possess a sublime, philosophic poetry. But the accompanying facts of physical decay are merely vile. Dying, we gasp for air and cough blood and vomit, and waste to shriveled remnants of ourselves. After death, bad gets worse, as our rotting organs seep noxious fumes and make mansions for maggots. I only had to read one book about putrefaction before deciding that I would be cremated when I died. Cremation is the soul’s way of death, the closest the mind can come to annihilating the spent body. Let fire evaporate me, not worms liquefy me. Cremation, whatever its terrors, at least is clean.

Besides being squeamish about physicality, I resent how matter lords it over mind. Plato says in one of his dialogues, “Soul is the master, and matter its natural subject.” I agree that it ought to be so, but the facts are opposite. Whenever I get sick or injured, I am dismayed to discover how little control I have of my life. Because someone sneezed a germ too small to see into my bloodstream, my universe shrinks to a pillow and sheets. The mere calcium of my ankle, by breaking inopportunely, can cancel a carefully planned and paid-for vacation. My relation to my body resembles a privy council’s relation to an adolescent king. I am thoughtful and wise and know best what to do, but my capricious body possesses the power and final authority, and I must tiptoe round its whims.

I am always unnerved to hear of a mind of genius—a Nobel laureate or great mathematician—killed in a car crash. Is it not strange that someone so intelligent should be so helpless against mindless metal? In a contest between genius and steel panel, amazingly steel panel wins. The mind’s outward creation, culture, is similarly frail. Centuries of intellectual labor filled the Library of Alexandria, which illiterate fire burned down in a few hours. Eons of human progress could end next year with the smash of an errant meteor. Plato’s Great Chain of Being got hung upside down, for rocks hold sway over humanity.

Granted, it is not entirely fair to criticize matter as stupid. The human body, in keeping itself alive, does a vastly better job than any conscious effort could. How long would I last if I were put at the controls of my physical existence? Fumbling uncertainly with hundreds of thousands of levers, I would go blue from forgetting to breathe, then, remembering, would faint from meanwhile letting my pulse drop. Faced with the endless critical and absurdly complicated tasks of circulating blood, digesting food, interpreting retinal images and fighting bacteria, how would I ever find time to repair sunburned skin cells, grow hair or process the occasional nerve signal from my toes? Doctors go to school until they are 30 to learn a fraction of the great manual of life that an infant’s body knows at birth.

Nevertheless, this intelligence of bodies is cold and alienating. I recall the sense of eeriness I felt several years ago when learning computer science, the eeriness of discovering the lifeless corridors of binary digits and microprocessors beneath the monitor’s meaningful display. The facade of humanized banners, buttons and icons on our screens masks an unstaffed control center of electrical switches, clicking on and off, their changing patterns of charges translating miraculously but mindlessly into the streaming wonders of words and colors we perceive.

So, too, pry behind the rich graphics flashing across the screen of being—the self-organizing of galaxies, the coordination of ecosystems, and the complexity of biological life—and you arrive at the imbecilic machinery of it all, electrons flowing through the circuit boards of the stars, motors whirring on the hard drives of our bodies. Beneath the intelligible there is only the unintelligent, a blank stare behind beautiful eyes, muteness behind the music.

I’ve written about my travails in community softball before, and here’s another dispatch from the front lines.

This year, I’ve been playing on church-league softball team (not my church…I’m a scab, a ringer, brought in for my ability to ensure that they have enough people to field a team), which is a different experience than the “town” league I played in last year. This league has prayers before and after the games and its players keep our anger and competitiveness jailed beneath our surfaces. So, you know, Christian.

The other day, as we all gathered at home plate…

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I’ve written about my travails in community softball before, and here’s another dispatch from the front lines.

This year, I’ve been playing on church-league softball team (not my church…I’m a scab, a ringer, brought in for my ability to ensure that they have enough people to field a team), which is a different experience than the “town” league I played in last year. This league has prayers before and after the games and its players keep our anger and competitiveness jailed beneath our surfaces. So, you know, Christian.

The other day, as we all gathered at home plate for the pre-game prayer, something wonderfully oxymoronic happened. The pastor of the church we were playing against bowed his head to pray and began, “Dear God of grace…” before looking up and barking, “Hats off!” Everyone scrambled to take their hats off of their heads while I chuckled to myself. So…is God a god of grace, or is he a god who doesn’t listen the prayers of those currently sporting a milliner’s finest? Is he graceful, or full of requirements?

I think that this little episode shows the disconnect that many Christians have when they think about God. We say that he is a God of grace. We know the word, and we know that it’s important…but we don’t actually believe it. We think that God isn’t gracious at all, that he won’t answer our prayers unless we do it right (Hats off!), and that if we mess up, we’re in trouble.

The trick is that both things are true. We mess up, and we’re in trouble…BUT GOD (Ephesians 2:4) is a God of Grace. God is full of requirements, and Jesus says that he’s not going to change one jot or tittle (Matt 5:18). Jesus, however, is also the embodiment of God’s grace to us.

He who always prayed with hat doffed became our hat-wearing prayers so that we could become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21). God’s first word is a word of Law, of requirement: Shape up! Hats off! God’s final word is a word of Gospel, of grace: I love you.

Wherever Christianity is viewed as a quiet submission to traditional patterns of conduct and an acceptance of social convention, there will be no appreciation of the atheism of Ivan Karamazov. His atheism begins to mean something when it becomes clear that the Christian gospel is a religious denunciation of religion–religion being understood as man’s attempt to relate himself constructively to the Holy. Traditional moralism and conventional piety have often put the objects of their search alongside God…

Read More » Some germane thoughts from the late Jaroslav Pelikan, taken from the “Dostoevsky: The Holy and the Good” chapter of Fools for Christ, ht CB:

Wherever Christianity is viewed as a quiet submission to traditional patterns of conduct and an acceptance of social convention, there will be no appreciation of the atheism of Ivan Karamazov. His atheism begins to mean something when it becomes clear that the Christian gospel is a religious denunciation of religion–religion being understood as man’s attempt to relate himself constructively to the Holy. Traditional moralism and conventional piety have often put the objects of their search alongside God and have in that sense been guilty of idolatry. Atheism refuses to believe in the divinity of any traditional morality, and in this it is correct, more correct than some of the external Christianity that opposes it in the name of Christ. No distinction between right and wrong will avail me anything when I am faced by the awesome and fascinating presence of the Holy. Obedience to law and loyalty to social convention fall harmless to the ground before His glance…

Dostoevsky’s study of human nature made him see a demonic element in man for which moralism could not account. Like few men before him, Dostoevsky learned to know the subtle means which the demonic employs in asserting itself with the hope of achieving divinity. The temptation “You will be like God” can come in the opportunity to violate moral law, as it did to Raskolnikov. It can also come in the guise of piety and morality, and it is in this latter form that the demonic is most seductive. Then it employs the sanctions of conventional morality for the accomplishment of its demonic ends. The ultimate and most profound critique of the identification of the Holy and the Good comes in the realization that the demonic in man transcends the moral sense and the ethical consciousness. Therefore, relation to the Holy is far more than accepting of living up to a moral code. As a matter of fact, accepting and living up to a code can be and often is the device by which the demonic ego defends its autonomy against the claims which the Holy lays upon it… God is more than the validation of our moral consciousness.

Read More » How do you write about the reality of the human condition in concrete terms without coming off as sanctimonious or a total downer? I don’t know, but I think Tim Kreider may. I’m sure I’m not the only one who was so impressed with (and addressed by) his essay “The Busy Trap” that appeared in The NY Times recently that they immediately ordered his essay collection, We Learn Nothing, which came out in paperback last month. Hard to imagine there’s another volume out there with endorsements from both Judd Apatow and David Foster Wallace, not to mention an astonishing opening quote from King Lear, “The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

After cracking it this week, DFW’s blurb, which I presume was written in reference to Kreider’s cartoon The Pain-When Will It End?, has been ringing in my head: “Kreider rules.” It’s true. This guy rules. It’s not just that he is funny in the extreme, or that he’s got a real gift for language, or that he’s clearly lived through a few things: it’s Kreider’s courage that I admire most. He uses the phrase “owning up” quite a bit, and I think it captures much of what makes these pieces so infectious and (counter-intuitively) encouraging. Think a slightly less raunchy/schlubby Louis CK, brutal but somehow not degrading, unafraid to excavate and expose his own self-justifications, to spill his guts and say the things we all think but never say. For whatever reason (part of it is spelled out in the first essay), Kreider has been given to cut through the baloney–both about himself and the culture at large–in a way that should be a lot more disheartening than it is. One feels known by his diagnosis (preachers take note!), which includes a very clear understanding of the limits of understanding. And I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that as dark as some of his discoveries may be, because they are so undeniably truthful, they provide starting points for compassion–and as Kreider frequently notes, hope. Obviously we come to some different conclusions about the nature of that hope (i.e. his feelings on religion/faith are not exactly sympathetic), but the anthropological honesty is deeply refreshing and dare-I-say humanizing. Here’s a section from his essay, “The Creature Walks Among Us”, that I wish I’d had the chutzpah to write:

The usual rationale for our nosy interest in the private disgraces of public figures is that they show poor judgment, but this is like charging kamikazes with poor navigation; these transgressions take place in a realm beyond judgment. The truth is, people are ravenous for sex, sociopaths for love. I sometimes like to daydream that if we were all somehow simultaneously outed as lechers and perverts and sentimental slobs, it might be, after the initial shock of disillusionment, liberating. It might be a relief to quit maintaining this rigid pose of normalcy and own up to the outlaws and monsters we are.

…The goal of life is not to provide material for good stories. Because it must also be noted that I’ve spent a larger percentage of my life than any sane person would wish crouching on the bathroom floor sobbing into a smelly old towel.

Heartbreak is the common term for this condition–a Hallmark euphemism for something that’s about as romantic as pancreatitis. I’ve endured three or four let’s call them episodes in my life. Which may not seem like all that many unless you’re a friend of mine who’s had to watch. I would not want to relive even one second of those times, nor would I wish them on anyone else, but I also don’t know if I can relate to anyone who hasn’t gone through them. (I respect people who had to quit drinking lest it kill them, but those who never saw the appeal of the stuff in the first place seem not quite to be trusted.) At such times we are certainly not at our best but we are undeniably at our most human–utterly vulnerable, naked and laid open, a mess.

Whenever I overhear someone talking on a cell phone about an illicit affair or excruciating divorce, or read the anguished confessions on postsecret.com or the hopeless mash notes in the “missed connections” ads, it feels like a glimpse into the secret history of the world. It belies the consensual pretense that the main thing going on in this life is work and the making of money. I love it when passion rips open that dull nine-to-five facade and bares the writhing orgy of need underneath…

My friend Lauren once told me that she could totally understand–which is not the same as sympathize with–those losers who kill their exes and/or their exes’ new lovers, that black, annihilating If-I-can’t-have-her-no-one-else-will impulse, because it’s so painful to know that the person you love is still out there in the world, living her life, going to work and laughing with friends and drinking margaritas. It’s a lesser hurt than grief, but, in a way, crueler–it’s more like being dead yourself, and having to watch life go on without you. I loved her for owning up to this. Not that Lauren or I–or you–would ever do any such thing ourselves. But I sometimes wonder whether the line between those of us who don’t do such things and the few who do is as impermeable as we like to think. Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clicking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn’t this happen every day? It makes me proud of all of us who are secretly going to pieces behind closed doors but still somehow keeping it together for the public, collaborating in the shaky ongoing effort of not letting civilization fall apart for one more day.

Cue Francis Spufford. Or John Z. Or St Paul. Or…