Rest in peace, John Stott.

“Here then are two instructions, ‘love your neighbor’ and ‘go and make disciples.’ What is the relation between the two? Some of us behave as if we thought them identical, so that if we have shared the Gospel with somebody, we consider we have completed our responsibility to love him. But no. The Great Commission neither explains, nor exhausts, nor supersedes the Great Commandment. What it does is to add to the command of neighbor-love and neighbor-service a new and urgent Christian dimension. If we truly love our neighbor we shall without doubt tell him the Good News of Jesus. But equally if we truly love our neighbor we shall not stop there.”

-John Stott (quoted by Fred Clark)

I never met the man, nor read any his books from cover to cover, nor heard him speak. But John Stott is one of my father's heroes, and in that way Stott has had a decisive influence on me. All for the best, I think.

If there's birdwatching in heaven...

(News via A Thinking Reed.)

Eternities.

Some of the recent talk about eternity at the Fear and Loathing in Georgetown blog came to mind when I read this, in an essay by Robert Jenson (who may someday be thought of as "the theologian of Time," given his steady conviction that time is not just stuff our souls happen to be halfway stuck in):

But there are many putative eternities and correspondingly many putative gods. There is, for example, the kind of eternity of which Plato spoke, that is to say, the still point at the center of the wheel of time, a depth of reality in which time simply does not move, a great nunc stans, a standing present tense. At an opposite extreme of sophistication, the point about ancestors in animistic faith is that an ancestor is someone who has gotten so old that nothing surprises him or her any longer, so that in consultation with the ancestor the surprising things that time brings forth are unveiled as not surprising at all.

-Robert Jenson, "Faith and the Integrity of the Polity." Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (98)

Vita voluntaria.

Quite possibly what freedom looks like in a non-voluntarist society:

When Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, wrote to dissuade a canon, living according to the Rule of St. Augustine, from becoming a hermit, he raised the objection that the life of a hermit was a vita voluntaria. By this he did not mean that it was a life voluntarily adopted, but that every detail of the life was at the will of the individual: the life governed by a well-established rule was higher, and essentially freer.

[...]

Freedom could only be defined by reference to the law, by which those who were free were governed. Freedom was not a status like serfdom; it was a quality which was attached to the status of all who were not serfs. This quality was the quality of rational order. The mere freeman, with no further qualification, was a man who stood on a zero line: it was not easy to decide on which side he stood, and he could easily be pushed across the line into unfreedom. It was only when the quality of freedom was articulated by being attached to the status of knight, burgess or baron that it could be observed, analysed and measured.

-R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages. New York: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953. (107-8)

Movie report: Czech animation.

As I've mentioned before, some of my friends here in Baltimore have put together a film club. The newest member of our club studied animation in Prague, and her first selection was a set of short films from notable Czech stop-motion animators. My favorite of the bunch was Jan Švankmajer's "J.S. Bach: Fantasia in G Minor", which sets images and animations of windows, walls, and doorways to Bach's organ music. About two-thirds of the way through, there's a marvelous series of doorways...



We also watched Jiří Barta's "The Vanished World of Gloves," which I imagine is a must-see for any student of film history.

Two interesting articles on art.

1. Via Anti-Climacus, an NYT review of a book that wrestles with high art's often confused relationship with violence and violation. Excerpt from the review:

   This is an important and frequently surprising book. By reframing the history of the avant-garde in terms of cruelty, and contesting the smugness and didacticism of artist-clinicians like the notorious Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch and other heirs of Sade and Artaud, Nelson is taking on modernism’s (and postmodernism’s) most cherished tenets. After all, aesthetic shock has under­written most of our cultural innovation for over a century.

   This seems like a work that would fit comfortably alongside volumes of theological aesthetics.
2. An article at The Curator called "Eclipsing the Object," in which the writer first diagnoses pathologies in contemporary art criticism and then attempts a healthy essay that really looks at the art. Not that I can really vouch for the diagnosis, but it's quite certainly not the usual traditionalist rhetoric. (A quick side note: Maritain makes a big deal about concepts being tools by which we grasp things themselves. Perhaps the Thomist account of intellection pushes you inexorably toward the seeing described in this article, whereas a "modern" epistomology continually retreats into conceptual frames. If so, that's one answer to my earlier questions about intellection...)

"Perhaps axiomatic, perhaps even dogmatic..."

Excuse the Monday morning snark, but I read Anat Biletzki's NYT Opinionator essay on human rights and religion (via FLG) as saying, "Well, maybe we can't account for human rights as well as you religious folk can, but at least we can be fanatically and totally devoted to them!"

You take what you can get, I suppose.

Byzantine policies.

Liudprand was the Bishop of Cremona from 961 to 972. He made a journey to Byzantium in 968 and tried to bring back some of Byzantium's fine purple silk, but his silk was confiscated by customs officials. Here is the letter he sent to Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor in Germany:

So, you see, they judge all Italians, Saxons, Franks, Bavarians, Swabians--in fact all other nations--unworthy to go about clothed in this way. Is it not indecent and insulting that these soft, effeminate, long-sleeved, bejewelled and begowned liars, eunuchs and idlers should go about in purple, while our heroes, strong men trained to war, full of faith and charity, servants of God, filled with all virtues, may not! If this is not an insult, what is?

- Liudprand of Cremona, quoted in R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages. London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953. (33-34)

R.W. Southern's gloss on the passage: "Of course, anyone might write like this after a brush with customs officers."

Tree of Life spoiler alert.

There's a rapturous review of Tree of Life up at Books and Culture. As an aside, I'm not faulting the reviewer for being enthusiastic. Had I written a review, it would have been, if possible, more positive. But the interesting part comes at the very end, when the reviewer argues that everyone (including me) misinterpreted the end of the film:

Contrary to nearly every review, the final scenes of the film are not a vision of the afterlife (Jack never dies) but rather a highly abstract rendering of the experience of stepping into faith. After nearly two and a half hours of recounting the tuggings of grace, The Tree of Life attempts to capture the moment of reconciliation with God.

If I were tasked with responding to this, I'd say that in the nexus between conversion and eschatological vision lies Christian hope. That is, the moment of conversion is bound, not to a literal vision of the afterlife, but to a taste of the life of the world to come.

Hodgmania.

There's a great long interview with John Hodgman at the AV Club. My favorite line:

"You see them arriving in this city, New York, practically every 30 seconds—and all of us who live here, unless we were born here, was one of them at some time—who are drawn like moths to a cliché, to things that will destroy them, to a completely unnecessary complication in one’s young or not-so-young life, to live in a completely implausibly expensive city and sacrifice savings and sanity and living space to be here for some period of time. I guess it’s like experimenting with smoking cigars in college: Sometimes you just have to get it over with, and unfortunately for some people, it becomes a lifestyle."

Also, the beginning of an interesting train of thought on affectations:

"The mustache is an affectation that I grew as a joke, and then just sort of enjoyed, and it allows me to really embrace wholeheartedly the idea of affectedness, and affectations in one’s personality. ... [S]omehow when I started the affectation of wearing the mustache, and started thinking about affectations, I was reminded of someone I know from the literary world who is extremely affective, unapologetically so. ... I obviously can’t reveal who that person is, because it would be mean."

Maybe I'll better understand what he's getting at if I ever watch Bored to Death, because that's what he's talking about.

Also, I had no idea that Phil Morrison, director of the excellent Junebug, was the man behind the camera for those Mac vs. PC commercials.