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.

Movie report: Heart of a Dog.

Some of my friends here in Baltimore have put together a little Monday night movie club, and we've watched some interesting stuff. (My picks so far have been The Lady Eve and Spirited Away.) This week's pick was a 1988 Russian film called Heart of a Dog. It was adapted from an old book of the same name by Mikhail Bulgakov; this book was an important piece of samizdat (underground literature) under the Soviet regime.

The movie is set in mid-1920s Moscow, as Russian society is adjusting to the communist regime. A hungry stray dog is taken in by a famous doctor, only to become the subject of the doctor's experimental cross-species pituitary-implant surgery. The experiment's unexpected result: the dog slowly turns into a human being, and a wretched, brutish one at that. As the dog-man falls in with the local Soviets, he makes life more and more unbearable for his wealthy caretakers. There's quite a bit of barbed humor: when the doctor asks his research subject to demonstrate his skills on the balalaika for a crowd of scientists, the dog-man's song and dance decays into feverish proletarian doggerel (so to speak). When the dog-man needs a job, he becomes the city's official stray cat catcher/killer, and takes an unseemly joy in his work. All in all, it's a biting satire on Soviet attempts to elevate human nature.

Now, this was clearly a product of the perestroika era: at no point before Gorbachev could a director have gotten away with portraying the Soviet functionaries as officious morons. But it was interesting that it took me a few minutes to understand that the wealthy doctor's decadence was also meant to be off-putting, even immoral. My eyes, apparently, are used to a Hollywood glamorization of wealth (not our only approach to wealth, but nevertheless a common one). But if you pay attention, it appears that most of the doctor's surgeries involve transplanting animal organs into rich people to "rejuvenate" their libidos. In that light, the doctor's insistence that he deserves his well-decorated seven-room flat rings as hollow as the dog-man's later claim, on the grounds of a certificate he somehow managed to acquire from a bureaucrat, to his own "thirty-seven square feet" of the place.

Maritain.

I've started reading John Trapani's Poetry, Beauty, & Contemplation: The Complete Aesthetics of Jacques Maritain. I picked this one after reading Matthew Milliner's hearty recommendation in the pages of First Things (subscription required). I've been thinking about what I hope to get out of such a book.

Philosophical theories of aesthetics need to account for both the experience of the person encountering an artwork and the creative work of the artist. My particular interests follow that division. First, how do I account for my own range of responses to art, high and low? A good book on aesthetics will help me understand my own judgments, and perhaps render comprehensible works that have thus far been mystifying. Second, what is the proper function of artistic communication in a Christian community? This question takes special weight for an evangelical like me, who has concluded that the artists of his subculture, though well-intentioned, generally got it wrong.

Maritain is a promising figure. He was a Thomist philosopher, which certainly embeds his work in the Christian tradition. But he was also a well-connected Parisian intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century, and counted as his friends artists whose work is decidedly modern. So I expect to find his pre-modern philosophy in conversation with more contemporary theories of art.

My worry has to do with the Thomism. As best I understand the history, Thomas Aquinas follows Aristotle in positing a human faculty that deals directly with the essences of things. When I look at an apple, I get some information from sight, but my soul's grasping that this is an apple means not just that I've applied a label to what I take to be a single thing, but that my soul has perceived that this is appleness itself. (I'm writing roughly, and surely have all the terms wrong.) I expect that Maritain will also take this view of intellection in his discussion of beauty, and argue that encountering beauty is something other than finding a pleasing conceptual arrangement "in my mind" or experience a complex sensory pleasure. The problem is that this view of the soul doesn't seem at all natural or intuitive to me.

So what would it take to convince me? I'm not sure if this book will put Maritain's theories in conversation with those of other thinkers, or if it will merely give me the framework to chase down these conversations in Maritain's own texts. But judging from the first few chapters, the book won't be a bad read, and I'll post my findings here as I go.

Envy.

Apparently Alan Jacobs happened to see a guerrilla performance of one of my favorite pieces, Tallis's Spem in Alium. It's a motet for forty voices, and it's pretty clear that standing among the singers is the right way to hear the piece. Alas, I've had to make do with various stereo systems. Here's the video:



The sound quality's pretty low, so here's a better recording:

Corporations.

I had an idea for something like this history of the corporation when I was an undergraduate. I wanted to start with early corporate forms and trace their evolution to the present day. At the time, though, I didn't know where to start, and nothing ever came of it. So I'm inclined to swipe some books from this guy's reading list and give it a half-hearted go now. In particular, the one about the East India Company looks fascinating.

Not having gotten into the history yet, I can't do much about the body of the essay except express curiosity. But the section on framing modernity is problematic:

The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business. That is also roughly the order of decreasing strength, increasing legibility and partial subsumption of the four forces ... Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force. It includes such tricky things as race, language and religion. Business, like gravity in physics, is the weakest and most legible: it can be reduced to a few basic rules and principles...

Maybe it's particularly modern to put race, art, and religion all under the same label, and it'll take a little more work to convince me that "culture" in this setting doesn't just mean "forces I can't easily analyze." If Christianity is true -- as whole cultures have believed it to be -- then God's interaction with mankind would presumably deserve a top-tier category of its own. It's hard to imagine the Greek philosophers accepting this particular ranking of politics, war, and business, and they weren't unobservant. And what about science and scholarship? This fourfold division is cute, but I don't find it all that useful.

But even though I find the overall framing a little silly, he's got a nice description of the way that the corporation form shifted its goal from spatial domination to ownership of time, and an interesting suggestion about the diminishing returns in this practice.

Ravens harrassing eagles.

Here's two short nature videos, one where a raven steals a piece of meat from an eagle, and another where a raven messes with some young eagles doing a courtship dance. I also like the tumbly raven.

These links go to a PBS site; I won't be surprised if they don't last for more than a few months.

What in water...?

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and donwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent overflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomatic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, iceflows: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the wandering moon.

Happy Bloomsday, everyone.

I want to party with you, cowboy.

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

I just have to transcribe some of this stuff:

Herzog: "I do believe that these very intelligent people invented God, but it took God a while to grow up and create the world."

Colbert: [long pause]

Colbert: "I don't usually have guests this deep, so you shook me there for a second."

And:

Herzog: "In Cave of Forgotten Dreams there's a postscript when all of a sudden you see radioactive albino crocodiles in the film. I called the producer from when I was shooting and he was in a pet store in Vancouver and just had bought a cage for a hamster and he said 'I just bought a cage of a hamster' and I said 'I'm filming albino mutant crocodiles, radioactive crocodiles.' And I hear this clatter. He dropped the cage! And said, 'you are shooting WHAT?' And I said I am shooting albino crocodiles, and they will be in the film."

And:

Herzog: "You see, if I were only fact based... you see, the book of books then, in literature, would be the Manhattan phone directory. Four million entries, everything correct. But it dusts out of my ears and I do not know: do they dream at night? Does Mr. Jonathan Smith cry in his pillow at night? We do not know anything when we check all the correct entries in the phone directory. I'm not this kind of a filmmaker."

You're not punk.

The Mountain Goats cover Jawbreaker

I knew these guys would knock it out. Love that he replaced "Kerouac" with "Didion."

Much love to the Neighborhood Theater.

A friend passed along a CNN feature on Charlotte that includes a video about the Neighborhood Theatre, which I'm sad to hear almost had to close. Here's the basics of the CNN story:

With unemployment at a minuscule 4.2%, the city had engineered a light rail public transit line, a modern public transportation center and a multi-million dollar indoor sports arena. Restaurants and retail moved in. Museums built new spaces .The plan was to transform the city into a savvy center of the modern South.

Then there's the "after."

[...]

In the last four months of 2008, the Charlotte area lost more than 3,000 financial jobs. Unemployment jumped to 6.6% starting in 2008, then 8%. By February of 2011, the number reached its terrible peak: 12.9%, even higher than the national rate of 9.7% at the time.

If anyone wondered why I moved to Baltimore...

I'm curious about the book cited in the article, called Banktown: The Rise and Struggles of Charlotte's Big Banks. Hope to get to read it sometime soon.

Pocket diary.

In the Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay, Nabokov writes:

As early as October 28 (New York, Hampshire House, room 503) I find the following plan penciled in my little book: "a novel, a life, a love--which is only the elaborate commentary to a gradually evolved short poem." The "short poem" started to become a rather long one soon after the Queen Elizabeth ("Buy dental floss, new pince-nez, Bonamine, check with baggage-master big black trunk on pier before embarcation, Deck A, Cabin 71") deposited at Cherbourg on November 7. Four days later, at the Principe e Savoia in Milan and then throughout the winter in Nice, in a rented flat (57 Promenade des Anglais) and after that in Tessin, Valais, and Vaud ("Oct. 1, 1961, moved to Montreux-Palace") I was absorbed in Pale Fire, which I finished on December 4, 1961.

Today I'm starting a "little book" of my own. Though there are certainly Internet- or computer-based options for this sort of thing, I think the portability and simplicity of the small notebook wins out for now. Even if I had an iPhone (and I'm sure there are nice apps for this sort of thing, or ways to integrate it in a calendar), it's nice to not have to worry about an inability to transfer the data to some future gadget. You can't export from a notebook, but on the other hand you don't need to worry about it going haywire and refusing to let you read it.

I hope that this will pay off, and that years down the road I'll be able to follow Nabokov's example and bask in details that my brain has long since left in the fog.

Pruss on truth.

Three interesting posts from Alexander Pruss:

• The sacramentality of assertion: "Some Catholic thinking about sexuality goes something like this: There is a sacramentality to the marital act. The giving of self to another, and the seeking of the other's receiving and reciprocation, is a symbol of the union between God and his people, and maybe even has a Trinitarian significance of imaging the self-giving and generative nature of God. [...] I think it is worth thinking about the sacramentality in assertion as well."
• Is it good to be the sort of person who is never willing to lie?: "There are cases where it seems that great harm comes from a refusal to lie. Thus there appears to be a strong consequentialist case against an absolutist position against lying. But I think that if we shift from act-consequentialism to what one might call character-consequentialism, there may be a case for an absolutist position."
• The truth shall set you free: "So it seems that in concluding that one should embark on the Socratic quest for self-knowledge and the truth about the deep things of life one is optimistically supposing that the probability of finding soul-crushing despair is not so great as to make the quest too risky."