nobody but the baby

[poem of the moment] George Herbert -- The Collar

   

¶   The Collar.

I Struck the board, and cry’d, No more.
I will abroad.
        What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
        Loose as the winde, as large as store.
                Shall I be still in suit?
        Have I no harvest but a thorn
        To let me bloud, and not restore
What I have lost with cordiall fruit?
Sure there was wine
            Before my sighs did drie it: there was corn
              Before my tears did drown it.
        Is the yeare onely lost to me?
                Have I no bayes to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
All wasted?
        Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
                Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee
        Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
        While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
                              Away; take heed:
                              I will abroad.
Call in thy deaths head there: tie up thy fears.
                              He that forbears
               To suit and serve his need,
                              Deserves his load.
But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde
                              At every word,
        Me thoughts I heard one calling, Childe:
                And I reply’d, My Lord.

[i found this online version here: http://bit.ly/4W5Y5J]

[the picture is "burning stubble, up close" and it is on flickr here: http://bit.ly/5Gs5D3]

Empire of Illusion

I have been reading Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

In general, I find Hedges really smart, and quite compelling. He remains these things, but nonetheless this is a very strange book.

It is not about literacy. It is about spectacle. But more than anything it is a cry for help. His argument, valuable for its powerful descriptive reportage alone, is not coherent in its proposal. This is a howling jeremiad, anguished, justified, but not constructive. My dominant feeling is that Hedges is (rightly) fearful for his children's future.

Temporary Blog Silence

"Sometimes the silence can be like the thunder
 Sometimes I wanna take to the road and plunder..."
-bob dylan // love sick // 1997

"bisy backson." 
-winnie the pooh. 

For more immediate digital fingerprints, check my tumblr or my twitter.

A whole new take on "getting stuff done."

Josiah Peter Tam-Linh Maskell (9.21.2009)

 

  And now, O Lord, this man of God, 

                         Who breaks the bread of life this morning -- 
                         Shadow him in the hollow of thy hand, 
                         And keep him out of the gunshot of the devil. 
                         Take him, Lord -- this morning -- 
                         Wash him with hyssop inside and out, 
                         Hang him up and drain him dry of sin. 
                         Pin his ear to the wisdom-post, 
                         And make his words sledge hammers of truth -- 
                         Beating on the iron heart of sin. 
                         Lord God, this morning -- 
                         Put his eye to the telescope of eternity, 
                         And let him look upon the paper walls of time. 
                         Lord, turpentine his imagination, 
                         Put perpetual motion in his arms, 
                         Fill him full of the dynamite of thy power, 
                         Anoint him all over with the oil of thy salvation, 
                         And set his tongue on fire. 

-- from "Listen Lord: A Prayer"
in God's Trombones 
  by James Weldon Johnson

Terry Eagleton on Performatives and Propositions

From Terry Eagleton's recent interview with Nathan Schneider for The Immanent Frame.

++++

NS: When you talk about it being beyond choice—I’ve been interested to see how Richard Dawkins calls himself a “post-Christian atheist” and talks about celebrating Christmas.

TE: I think, actually, he’s a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place! That would be rather like Madonna calling herself post-Marxist. You’d have to read him first to be post-him. As I’ve said before, I think that Dawkins in particular makes such crass mistakes about the kind of claims that Christianity is making. A lot of the time, he’s either banging at an open door or he’s shooting at a straw target.

NS: You say he emphasizes a “propositional” account of religious faith above a “performative” one. But how far can one go believing in God performatively, through political acts, before it becomes a proposition?

TE: All performatives imply propositions. There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on. The performative and the propositional work into each other. But it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional, just as it would be for someone trying to analyze a literary text, which is basically a performance. Somebody who didn’t grasp that would be making a root-and-branch mistake about the kind of thing being confronted. These new atheists, and, indeed, the great majority of believers, have been conned rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic theology, into believing that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions.

++++

To me, there is a more interesting insight here than the usual critique of propositionalism that gets trolled out anytime you mention that the ideas present in a religion actually matter. As one who tilts towards intellectual history (so sue me...I went to the University of Chicago), I have often had the experience of feeling that I have to justify this interest among otherwise perfectly reasonable colleagues in religious studies, because as "we" all now know, the great modernist mistake, from Descartes to the Marxists to the positivists to John Milbank, was to underestimate the value of practices in the first-order formation of ideology. 

Of course there is merit to this criticism. But, while embracing it, I remain deeply suspicious of the claim that that religions are little to nothing more than the sum of their practices. It strikes me that the ideas present in a religion, whether they are at a given moment latent or expressed, "scholastic" or practical, ought to be taken seriously as indicators of what that religion is about, where that religion might find itself moving, and how one might critique that religion from inside or outside. We ignore ideas at our peril. Perhaps this is a post-postmodern insistence. 

In this snippet, Eagleton is making some version of the anti-propositional argument, and more power to him.  But his opening comment is what interests me: "All performatives imply propositions. There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on." He is, in effect denying the luxury that so many of us postmoderns opt into, namely agnosticism about the nature and effect of our ideas about reality. Performance alone does not a culture make, so if we want to think well about any culture, we had better not ignore its ideas. Beliefs and practices always already go hand in hand and inform one another. We have propositional commitments which inform all that we do, and we had better understand what they are and why they matter. This is not rocket science, but its significance is often missed. 

Desiring the Kingdom by James K.A. Smith

My instinct, which is surely not infallible, suggests that this book could be huge. If it is not huge, it certainly should be. Anyone thinking about the formation of human beings, particularly with respect to the connection between ideas and desires, would be well-advised to pick it up. I am thinking not just teachers, but religious leaders, parents, graduate students, professors, coaches...basically anyone who has a vested interest in why people do what they do. 

Smith's book explores questions of the education of the soul from the point of view of the Christian tradition. The author is a philosophy professor at a Christian college in Michigan. He offers a sweeping perspective of the very deep resources of two millennia of Christian reflection on these questions. These reflections would be of real interest to any open-minded inquirer who is not convinced that human beings are most completely understood as sentient factories of ideas and social productivity.

He is also a huge fan of March 16-20, 1992 by Uncle Tupelo. This means he is wise, tasteful, and worthy of high regard. 

Here is an excerpt from the book's introduction, in which Smith unpacks insights from George Orwell on education and the situation of the working class in England in the early 20th century in his book The Road to Wigan Pier. 

...The first half of the book is Orwell at his finest as an investigative journalist, filling in the picture of the plight of the working class from firsthand immersion. It is a harrowing account of malnutrition, illness, and the debilitating psychological effects of persistent unemployment and poverty. But in the second half of the book, Orwell takes a surprising turn: he takes on the supposed middle-class champions of the working class, the intellectual Left, and challenges their sympathies. In particular, he questions whether they're really ready to jettison the class structure that they renounce in the parlors and lecture halls of London.

It is in this context that he provides a powerful portrayal of the effects of education. Orwell captures the odious nature of this caste system by seizing upon an axiom that eludes simple propositional articulation. As he puts it, "The real secret of class distinctions in the West" can be "summed up in four frightful words" that are often left unuttered: The lower classes smell. ... Orwell's point is that the root of class distinctions in England is not intellectual; it's olfactory. The habits and rhythms of the system are not so much cerebral as visceral; they are rooted in a bodily orientation to the world that eludes theoretical articulation, which is why theoretical tirades also fail to displace it. Thus Orwell notes that we run up against "an impassable barrier": "For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling." Almost every other kind of discrimination could be countered theoretically, with the weapons of facts, ideas, and information, "but physical repulsion cannot."

But then, how does such a visceral stance get embedded in the middle and upper classes? It is a matter of formation ("in my childhood we were brought up to believe that they were dirty"), and more specifically, education. Thus Orwell recounts:

When I was fourteen or fifteen I was an odious little snob, but no worse than the other boys of my own age and class. I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English "education" fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school...but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

The information that the public schools provided--like Latin and Greek--didn't really take root. What did get inscribed in the pupils, however, was an entire comportment to the world and society, a training in "snobbishness" that could not be easily overturned or undone by new facts or data or information. What would be required to "root out" such a visceral orientation is an equally visceral and physical education or counter-formation. Thus Orwell...illustrates our core intuition that education is an embodied formation that captures our very being and shapes our orientation to the world.

James K.A. Smith, Desiring The Kingdom (Baker Academic, 2009), p. 29-30.

Christianity Today review

Think I recognize the place, but the furniture's rearranged...

I have gone and got me some new outlets. 

In the words of Jesus, "Come, follow me" (on Twitter...here)

And then there's Tumblr. It is like the contents of the back pocket that contains the brilliant critical note that you write while you're driving, but too often forget to take out of your jeans before they hit the warm rinse. You can post all manner of ways, including with full-res pictures and voice posts from your phone. I think that I might really dig this one. Check mine out here.

Not sure how all this content will parse itself out, but hey, I'm living the digital adventure.

The Continental Divide

We went to the place where rivers choose sides, east to the Atlantic or west to the Pacific. If you were that high, you'd choose sides too. Everyone chooses sides. 

It was all due to a loving invite from the Arvada Vineyard, and their loving helmspeople Jay and Danielle Pathak, to come out for a weekend and talk to their leaders about "whatever we wanted to." Who could refuse such an offer! We hit some of our favorites...the deadly risk at the heart of the gospel, the law/gospel frame for thinking about biblical justice, radical hope (as laid out by Jonathan Lear), the necessary presence of the future, and the opportunity presented by the collapse of the language of Christendom. Great stuff. We also talked about James Dobson's personal exit off I-25, which Kathy and I later saw. Awesome. Seriously, the Arvada folks were incredibly kind to us. You should go find them some day; they will probably be kind to you too.

In other news, Kathy is 33 weeks and counting!

My role is that of proud (expectant) father. What can I say? I was just being myself. 

Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Christians For Comprehensive Immigration Reform

I can't come up with a single reason why any thinking Christian would not get on board with this effort.

Check it out here.

CCIR is a coalition of Christian organizations, churches, and leaders from across the theological and political spectrum, united in support of comprehensive U.S. immigration reform. We are working together to see fair and humane immigration reform enacted in Congress this year because we share a set of common moral and theological principles that compel us to love, care for, and seek justice for the stranger among us.

We call for an end to the unproductive, divisive, and fear-driven anti-immigrant rhetoric in the media, which has often castigated all immigrants, regardless of citizenship status, and derailed attempts at true reform. As Christian leaders who share the biblical values named below, we commit to fostering civil dialogue on immigration in our churches and in our communities. We call on President Barack Obama to provide the leadership necessary to move from the hateful rhetoric that has often characterized this national debate to action that will fix our broken immigration system. We look forward to working alongside the president to lead a new national conversation on immigration policy that reflects the best of our moral and civic values.

We stand together in calling on President Obama and Congress to make humane and holistic immigration reform a top priority in 2009.