“Any life you make up is not a life you will want to live.”

Stanley Hauerwas begins a wonderful lecture in this manner:

“I lecture and write often, but I am not sure how to write to those our society identifies as the young or adolescents. I do not know who you are and I am a bit frightened by that unknown. The last band I knew was U2 and I only knew them because they were the last group introduced to me by my son before he ‘grew up.’ I do not know what you read or what movies you see. So I do not know how to ‘connect’ with you.

“Moreover, I think it is disgusting for an older guy to try to show he can be ‘with it.’ I do not want to be ‘with it.’ I quit teaching freshmen when I taught at the University of Notre Dame. I did so because I simply found it demeaning to try to convince eighteen-year-olds that they ought to take God seriously. Eighteen-year-old people in our society simply lack the resources to take God seriously—by a resource I mean having noticed that before you know it, you are going to be dead.

“Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher, has suggested to me that one of the worst things our society does to the young is to tell them that they ought to be happy. MacIntyre thinks if you are happy, particularly when you are young, you are deeply self-deceived. Your appropriate stance is to be miserable. What a terrible time to be young. Shorn of any clear account of what it means to grow up, you are forced to make up your own lives. But you know that any life you make up is not a life you will want to live.”

The lecture is a very nice glimpse of the foothills of the realm of theology as high adventure. If you've never read Hauerwas before, you ought to check this one out.

“Autoclave” (Mountain Goats Week part V)

“I was in Alaska when I read about the discovery of a life-form that can not only survive an autoclave (the instrument used for sterilizing surgical equipment; it's supposed to kill any and all bacteria on the tools), but which seems to really enjoy the whole autoclave scene: at temperatures fatal to all other life forms, this bacteria would begin to breed. Naturally, this got me thinking about people whose hearts involuntarily pulverize any good feeling that comes within a city block of them.”

-John Darnielle, Heretic Pride press release

After last night's big personal Lovecraft love-fest, I'm going to back off and say that my only personal connection to the song “Autoclave” is that sometimes I too feel like a “great, unstable mass of blood and foam.” What I am concerned with today is really just one verse of the song, in which the narrator deploys an overwrought vision of himself as king of Hell, and then winds things up with a reference to Cheers:

I dreamt that I was perched atop a throne of human souls,
on a cliff above the ocean: howling wind and shrieking seagulls.
And the dream went on forever, one single static frame.
Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.

Clunky mistake or clever ironic juxtaposition? Returning once again to the Village Voice review (the review is on point, what can I say?), we find Mike Powell arguing that John Darnielle is “the only lyricist I can think of with a sense of empathy wry enough and deep enough to liken a teenager's vision of hell to Cheers.” But plenty of unkind reviewers have pointed to it as an example of a clunker, and I have to admit that the clunker theory was my first reaction.

But after repeated listens, I realize that there is more than a touch of irony in the music as well. The rhythm is straight four-four, and the chords and melody are almost nothing but repetition. It's not a very emotional style, but, of course, the narrator tells us that “no emotion that's worth having can make my heart its home.” Considering, in addition, how careful John Darnielle is in his lyrics, I'm going to go with the irony theory. Hell is where this kid thinks that he'll find kindred spirits, and he'll probably be happier there anyway.

The point, I suppose, is that if you buy this album on my recommendation and then find that this one line about Cheers seems a little out of place, just turn to Irony, your trusty friend and adviser.

I'm going to wind things up tomorrow with “Michael Myers Resplendent.” If you can't afford the album but want to get a jump on things, you can get the demo mp3 in the archives of the Mountain Goats' official website.

“Lovecraft in Brooklyn” (Mountain Goats Week part IV)

“American horror icon H.P. Lovecraft moved to Red Hook, Brooklyn to be with the woman he loved. He had never really seen any people who were not white folks from Massachusetts. Immigrants were spilling into Brooklyn from the four corners of the globe. Lovecraft's xenophobia during his time in Brooklyn resulted in some of the weirdest, darkest images in all American literature. One must condemn Lovecraft's ugly racism, of course, but his not-unrelated inclination toward anything that's alive is pretty fertile ground.”

-John Darnielle, Heretic Pride press release

Way back in high school, I flipped through a Stephen King collection that I found in a library. (I hadn't really had much exposure to anything in the horror genre, having shunned it since I was nearly traumatized by a particularly frightening episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation when I was in elementary school… no joke.) King's short story “Jerusalem's Lot” threw me for a loop. It was about a man slowly confronting an ancient evil, and going mad in the process. I know now that this was King's tribute to H.P. Lovecraft. I remembered it as the weirdest horror story I had ever read. The weirdest, that is, until I found H.P. Lovecraft.

There was a point in my life when I spent most of my time alone in small room. It was the perfect time to discover H.P. Lovecraft. I don't know what put me on to him in the first place, but I can confirm that The Shadow Out of Time, read well after midnight on the weird gray light of a computer screen, stirred up a deep, deep unease. I also played through the entire Lovecraftian “interactive fiction” (i.e., text-based game) Anchorhead. It was a strange, nerdy, couple of weeks.

And one time on the streets of Lower Manhattan, at a certain time of night, the looming windowless AT&T Long Lines building took on such a sinister aspect that I could hardly breathe. At the time, I couldn't come up with any good explanation for why a building so tall wouldn't have openings to the outside, so everything that came to mind was unaccountably disturbing. I bet that H.P. Lovecraft lived like this all the time. John Darnielle certainly writes about him (or, rather, a character who identifies with Lovecraft) that way and, unlike me, he's read the biography.

If you've ever felt like you were becoming progressively detached from the rest of humanity, this song will get to you somewhere. You should bury this feeling, and hope it stays buried, but you will remember it in occasional spare moments. (The song's author says, “There’s this understanding that you have when you listen to a song that you’re going to somehow relate to the singer, but I’m not sure the narrator here is really a guy you’d want to be relating to too hard.”)

As a side note, Stephen King often takes the extreme opposite view of the universe. For Lovecraft, there is an evil somewhere out there in space, biding its time, far beyond our comprehension, and far too big to hate us as individuals. In King's world, there is a God somewhere out there in heaven, biding his time, far beyond our comprehension, and far too big to love us as individuals.

But I'll let you judge Darnielle's Lovecraft stand-in for yourself. Here's the third verse, in all its eldritch horror:

Woke up afraid of my own shadow,
like, genuinely afraid.
Headed for the pawnshop
to buy myself a switchblade.
Someday something's coming
from way out beyond the stars
to kill us while we stand here.
It'll store our brains in mason jars.
And then the girl behind the counter,
she asks me how I feel today.
I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn!

“Tianchi Lake” (Mountain Goats Week part III)

“Depending on whether you believe or not, this is a true story, sort of: there's a lake monster in China. People see it all the time. The Mountain Goats consider themselves friends to all lake and river monsters everywhere, whether they exist or not.”

-John Darnielle, Heretic Pride press release

Today's post is mostly an apology. When I said yesterday that Prince Far I and the San Bernadino kids were the purest characters in Heretic Pride, I didn't mention the poor Tianchi Lake Monster. I hadn't listened to the lyrics very carefully, but the melody and arrangement were so soothing that I assumed the monster just had to be eating children or something. This is, of course, the kind of anti-monster bias that probably keeps Nessie hidden and afraid for her life. But it seems like the Tianchi Monster just wants to swim around and daydream, which seems pure enough to me.

The song itself is a lovely little ode to mysteries and imagination. And let's leave it at that.

"Sept 15 1983" (Mountain Goats Week part II)

“This is about the death of Prince Far I, one of the most unusual and awesome figures to arise from the reggae explosion of the seventies. He was murdered in his home by unknown assailants on the date which gives this song its title. Far I was by all accounts a good guy, and his songs are loving, almost paternal urgings to the listener. Early in his career, he was called ‘King Cry Cry,’ owing to his tendency to burst into tears while singing. I'm not that emo yet but one almost wishes for that kind of sincerity, you know?”

-John Darnielle, Heretic Pride press release

Prince Far I is arguably the purest character on Heretic Pride—only the kids in “San Bernardino” seem to come close—and he ends up getting shot. (“Try, try your whole life / to be righteous and be good; / wind up on your own floor / choking on blood.”) The intelligent review over at the Village Voice has this to say:

“If villains find a home on earth, heroes only suffer displacement… The only fault on Heretic Pride turns out to be having faith. Prince Far I, shot thanks to causes totally out of his control, bleeds to death on a floor and still dreams of Israel, the home God has promised for him. The meth addicts on We Shall All Be Healed were every bit as delusional, but at least they were on drugs. Here, it's hard to tell whether Prince Far I's convictions are being pitied or celebrated—actually, they're both.”

The chorus seems to be Far I's last thoughts as he drifts away to somewhere else: “The heat drifts across the land. / If I forget Israel, let me forget my right hand.” The song is full of conflicting imagery: the smell of onions from the dinner party is still in the air as the ambulance arrives, and the paramedic is both Gabriel and a man in a postal-blue uniform. Even the killers are cast in religious terms, as servants of the Pharaoh. In Darnielle's story, Far I can give his life and death meaning even as he slips further away from them. The tale of persecuted Israel, of the righteous and the wicked, provides sense for a seemingly (truly?) senseless event.

Here's Darnielle, in Paste, on religion:

“I've always envied zealots. The depth of their faith, the imagery. I find most mystical explanations of things more interesting and appealing than the true ones. I'm always interested in hearing the lie. I've always been interested in that, and cults and heresy. As a Catholic by birth, the notion of learning something is true all of the days of your life and then one day going, ‘I don't agree with that’…”

So, yes, poor Prince Far I believes the lie, but it seems that the purity of his belief more than redeems its object.

But, words aside, this is one of the nicer melodies on the album, and is another example of a song where a violent story plays out over calming music.

Post-what?

post- (prefix): after in time or order

“Postmodern” is a neat word, in that it has an actual meaning in a few specific contexts (architecture, philosophy), but otherwise it just describes something that you like, or maybe that you don't like, depending on who you are. But even if the usage signifies little, the intent of the word is usually plain: something new, something that comes after what is modern.

The word “postliberal” is even less problematic. It signifies a willingness to let go of or strongly modify the major philosophical concepts of Enlightenment liberalism, such as universal reason and natural rights, or, in the theological sense, to move past the liberal theology. Liberalism, generally, is more defined than modernism, and so we have a better meaning. If you tell me that a theologian is postliberal, I will have a very good idea of what you mean.

But now I am perturbed to find that some theologians are trying to use the word “postconservative”:

“Postconservatives ‘try to move beyond the limitations of conservative theology,’ Olson writes, ‘without rejecting everything about it.’ They still center theology on the Bible, conversion, the Cross, and transformation. But whereas conservatives show ‘slavish adherence’ to an ‘incorrigible’ tradition, postconservative evangelicals say they defer to tradition and orthodox doctrine critically and constructively.”

Just because conservative theologians have banded together doesn't mean that the word conservative should signify a particular set of positions. Perhaps “postorthodox” is the word they are seeking, but are afraid to use. If they aren't trying to move beyond orthodoxy, then they should come up with a better word to positively denote their theologies.

Here's the real problem with “conservative” and “postconserative”: what the authors actually mean by the former is “traditionalist,” and what they mean by the latter is “conservative, properly understood.” Conservatism conserves a tradition in the face of change, and is thus necessarily self-conscious. This has been said better elsewhere (see the quotation at the top of the linked page).

This is all further evidence that, for many people, the prefix “post-” means the same thing as the word “cool.”

(Mountain Goats week will continue tonight.)

"Heretic Pride" (Mountain Goats Week part I)

“You could call this song a persecution fantasy, but really, who can say the word ‘fantasy’ without flinching? Not me, and I have a stronger stomach than most. SPOILER ALERT: The main character will not live long after he gets done lauding his imminent demise.”

-John Darnielle, Heretic Pride press release

OK, so I'm declaring this week to be Mountain Goats week here at William Writes. I don't have a well-developed plan, but I will probably pick five songs from the new album and write about them, from now until Friday. You don't like it? Too bad. It's my blog. I get confrontational when I listen to the Mountain Goats.

“Heretic Pride,” as the Pitchfork review pointed out, bears a remarkable similarity to the song “If You See Light,” from Get Lonely. You can't quite call it a sequel, as the narrator of “If You See Light” may have been imagining his persecution (“Waiting for the front door to splinter, / waiting all winter”), whereas the narrator of “Heretic Pride” is being buried alive by the end of the song. But in both songs, you have one man against the hostile villagers.

These two songs tells you all you need to know about the difference between Get Lonely and Heretic Pride. If you listened to Get Lonely, you know that it was something like the Distilled Essence of Post-Breakup Existential Drifting Ending in Suicide, and took you to some weird headspace. Get Lonely's protagonist was at a place where, completely drained of hope, he recoiled from all human contact:

When the villagers come to my door
I'll be all tucked away with my face to the floor
and my eyes closed.

And no one knows how to keep secrets 'round here.
They tell everyone everything, soon as they know.
And then where is there left for poor sinners to go?

But the characters in Heretic Pride have recovered that not-entirely-sane conviction common to so many of John Darnielle's best songs. Remember Cyrus and Jeff from All Hail West Texas? Or “Going to Georgia”? Or “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me!”? Well, here's the narrator of “Heretic Pride”:

Well they come and pull me from my house,
and they drag my body through the streets.
And the sun's so hot I think I'll catch fire
and burn up in the summer air so moist and sweet.

And the people all come out to cheer.
Rocks in the pathway break my skin.
And there's honeysuckle on the faint breeze today
with every breath I'm drawing in.

I want to cry out, but I don't scream and I don't shout.
And I feel so proud to be alive.
And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives!

Crowds grow denser by the second
as we near the center of the town.
And they dig a trench right in the main square right there,
and they pick me up and throw me down.

But I start laughing like a child
and I mark their faces one by one.
Transfiguration's gonna come for me at last
and I will burn hotter than the sun.

I waited so long, and now I taste jasmine on my tongue.
And I feel so proud to be alive.
And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives!

Yes! This is the first song that has ever made me want to espouse some terrible belief for the sole purpose of getting myself executed. Sure, the impartial observer might see this guy as a pathetic, wriggling sociopath, but that doesn't make any difference to the martyr. There is something fascinating, even noble, about the truly independent heretic. (Heresy loses all luster when it gains a large following.) Is this radical individualism? Glorification of mere non-conformity? Well, I suppose that for a fuller consideration of the issue, it might be better to know the particular heresy at stake, as well as the nature of the society that he finds so objectionable. But in the abstract, this is one of the better apologies against orthodoxy that I've seen. Take that, Chesterton.

edit: Evidently I didn't take the line about a “reckoning” quite seriously enough. According to John Darnielle, this character may be embracing his own guilt.

“I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives!”

Today I picked up Heretic Pride, the latest offering from the Mountain Goats. And I have to say that I needed this. I wouldn't dream of trying to review John Darnielle's songwriting; I listen to it because it reviews me. There will be more writing about this album as I absorb it, but one thought occurs on the first spin:

Jon Wurster flippin' gets it. I love these drums. It's kind of like the stuff he did on the Superchunk song “So Convinced”: urgent, tricky, steady. I want him to be in this band forever.

On Buckley

Since Bill Buckley's death, I've come across a number of moving tributes to his life and work. Here's Peggy Noonan:

“I thought it beautiful and inspiring that he was open to, eager for, friendships from all sides, that even though he cared passionately about political questions, politics was not all, cannot be all, that people can be liked for their essence, for their humor and good nature and intelligence, for their attitude toward life itself. He and his wife, Pat, were friends with lefties and righties, from National Review to the Paris Review. It was moving too that his interests were so broad, that he could go from an appreciation of the metaphors of Norman Mailer to essays on classical music to an extended debate with his beloved friend the actor David Niven on the best brands of peanut butters. When I saw him last he was in a conversation with the historian Paul Johnson on the relative merits of the work of the artist Raeburn.

“His broad-gaugedness, his refusal to be limited, seemed to me a reflection in part of a central conservative tenet, as famously expressed by Samuel Johnson. ‘How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.’ When you have it right about laws and kings, and what life is, then your politics become grounded in the facts of life. And once they are grounded, you don't have to hold to them so desperately. You can relax and have fun. Just because you're serious doesn't mean you're grim.”

There are numerous other tributes, and they aren't hard to find. And one comes to the conclusion that William F. Buckley was a good man, in a very full sense. Of course, he was wrong about various things at various times, and sometimes dreadfully so — one tactless writer at Slate dug up an old column that Buckley wrote in support of segregationists — but, of course, nobody really begins as a good person. We have to grow into it, subjecting our impulses and opinions to something outside of ourselves. For Buckley, it seems that his Catholicism turned his mind towards higher things.

Not that religion is the only thing that can do this; ordinary compassion can point you in the right direction. But once one's transcendental (non-selfish) orientation gives that direction, what guarantees the ability to move in a new direction? The grace of a savior, as Mr. Buckley might have reminded us.

I'll leave off with one more passage, from Joe Sobran via Rod Dreher:

“Over the years I came to know another side of Bill. When I had serious troubles, he was a generous friend who did everything he could to help me without being asked. And I wasn’t the only one. I gradually learned of many others he’d quietly rescued from adversity. He’d supported a once-noted libertarian in his destitute old age, when others had forgotten him… I once spent a long evening with one of Bill’s old friends from Yale, whose name I won’t mention. He told me movingly how Bill stayed with him to comfort him when his little girl died of brain cancer. If Bill was your friend, he’d share your suffering when others just couldn’t bear to. What a great heart — eager to spread joy, and ready to share grief!

“Compared with all this, the political differences that finally drove us apart seem trivial now. I saw the same graciousness in his relations with everyone from presidents to menials. I learned a lot of things from Bill Buckley, but the best thing he taught me was how to be a Christian. May Jesus comfort him now.”

Funny New Math

From Andrew Sullivan, via Hodgman:

(garfield) - (garfield) = (actually funny)

Thank you, the internet, for showing us that there can be redemption for even the worst of daily comic strips.

Spengler gets out of hand.

Everyone knows that Barack Obama loves his country. What this essay presupposes is… maybe he doesn't?

I enjoy reading Spengler. But I think he was wrong about Rowan Williams, and I strongly doubt that he's right about Senator Obama. This essay is nothing but dirty, but, as Spengler explained in his forum, a candidate who runs on personality makes himself a target for personal attack.

Yet there exists a compelling explanation for the “emptiness” of Obamamania: the more a politician can avoid making promises during primary season, the easier it will be for that politician to swing towards the center in the main race.

John McCain will have plenty of time to make sure that Obama isn't a scary con man as soon as the primaries are done. Having said this, I'm going to get back to trying to avoid politics for the next nine months, unless some massive pro-parliamentary party appears to save us.

Back to Babylon?

Although it's not a blog that I read regularly, I found an interesting post on Inhabitatio Dei, entitled “Does Protestantism Exist?” It asks some questions that I've been asking myself, and answers them in a manner with which I have been toying.

“To be a protestant is to be situated in a particular historical stream of the Christian faith. To be a protestant, if that term is to have any real meaning at all, is to live one’s ecclesial life precariously, in essential vulnerability while attempting to call for radical reform of the Roman Catholic church. There can be no severing of the churches of the Reformation from the Roman Catholic church. We cannot think of the heritage of the Reformation in abstraction from the Roman Catholic church. If protestantism can be truly said to exist, it most exist as an ongoing form of engagement with the Roman Catholic church for the sake of the proper embodiment of the gospel.

“However, if protestantism has ceased to be such a form of ongoing engagement with the Roman Catholic church calling for reformation, then protestantism as such seems to have ceased to exist and something altogether different has come into being. Insofar as protestant churches have ceased to see their particularly protestant identity as qualified by historical connection to the Roman Catholic church they have ceased to be protestant. So, the question I have is, does protestantism exist, and if so, where?”

I'm no historian of theology, but it seems that now is a great time to think very hard about this question. Of course, there's no denomination that goes by the name “protestant”: we're all Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Anglicans, etc., and as such we have our own theological traditions. For a time, the culture of the United States was saturated with these traditions, but the flavor is weaker now, and becoming more so. (One could conceivably argue that much of this cultural protestantism was vaguely heretical anyway…)

And so it is important for young protestants than to find out who we are, and precisely what it is that we are charged to carry forward through history.

“Ljubljana!”

The Society for the Promotion of Folly: Sign me up!

I'm really sorry, but I thought you should read this.

Found on Millinerd's blog:

This vastly entertaining blog is sort of like the Chapelle show, but less outrageous and about White People. Not all white people: basically, just the ones who like the Arcade Fire and shop at Whole Foods. The culture posts hit very close to home:

Wes Anderson Movies: “If a white guy takes a white girl to a Wes Anderson movie on their first date, and neither of them have seen it, they will immediately commence a relationship that is reflected in songs by Ryan Adams and Bright Eyes.”

Not Having a TV: “The number one reason why white people like not having a TV is so that they can tell you that they don’t have a TV.”

Arrested Development: “They also love it because there are a few references to white popular culture, and if there is one thing that white people love, it’s cultural references that they understand (see Garden State, The Onion, and Juno for examples).”

Indie Music: “To a white person, being a fan of a band before they get popular is one of the most important things they can do with their life. They can hold it over their friends forever!”

Apologies: “In fact, white people are so used to apologizing that they start all sentences that might cause disagreement with ‘I’m sorry.’ For example ‘I’m sorry, but Garden State was a better film than Hard Eight.’”

Standing Still at Concerts: “Remember, at a concert everyone is watching you just waiting for you to try to start dancing. Then they will make fun of you. The result is Belle and Sebastian concerts that essentially looks more like a disorganized line of people than a music event.”

The site mostly takes aim at the slightly sub-hipster folks who regard themselves as paragons of open-mindedness, global thinking, and ironic fashion. Of course, irony returns in this manner: I'm guessing that those very people provided a clear majority of the blog's nearly three million hits.

I say “those people”: clearly I am distancing myself from that crowd. In a number of ways, I hardly fit the bill. I don't drink coffee, consider myself spiritual-but-not-religious (i.e. I'm openly religous) read David Sedaris, do yoga, or have difficult breakups. And while most of my friends fit into some category on this list, it still seems blog describes a very small demographic. I thank God that I don't fit this stereotype to a greater degree, and I mean that literally: when I don't fit something on the list, it has to do with my membership in a certain Christian community. As Matthew Millener says:

“While the mockery (let's face it) is earned, how does one escape the scourge? The site, it seems to me, has a lot to do with what we white people - indeed, any people - become when we lose the gospel - that most reliable tool for relentless self-criticism, that trusty crowbar for prying oneself from the world.”

But I'll certainly think twice before talking about my Apple products or my Netflix queue in the near future.

I will live in someplace very cold…

There was snow falling when I woke up this morning. Much has been said in many places about the character and effect of city snow, so I won't try to describe it. But I think that at this point in the afternoon, the snow is turning to rain, and the air is warm enough that watery slush is now plopping down off the tall buildings. Sometimes it seems like all the magic left in this world is of the sputtering, fitful, and ultimately inadequate variety.

Goatees

John Hodgman is exactly right:

“…the goatee is the facial hair of the desperately ambivalent…”

And:

“The Potts Famous Beard Manual indicates that a GOATEE signifies ‘false hopes’ and ‘flash over substance.’”

Click through to see how this relates to election season.

Nine Stitches

Went out to the hills with friends this weekend, wandered back into the woods, slipped on ice, dripped red blood all over the nice white snow, and ended up with stitches over my right eyebrow. Now I look like a goon, and I very much hope that the swelling goes down before class tomorrow.

My friend Brendan (who is quite a talented writer) is making his way through the novels of Robertson Davies, and he seems to be enjoying them as much as I did. Our conversations this weekend reminded me of the ways in which Mr. Davies's books changed the course of my thinking. Here's to a writer with a real vision of the deep comedy in the world, and to my favorite of his characters: poor Hector Mackilwraith.

"Beauty is the true form of distance."

So I'm stumbling on through David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite, a work that I am only able to grasp by impressions, when I can grasp it at all. The first part is all about the narratives of the sublime in continental philosophy, from Kant and Nietzsche on up to Derrida, Deleuze, Foucalt, and Levinas. What is it that keeps me trudging through these wild grasses looming so high over my head?

Well, the prose is splendid. And when I cheat ahead with the index, I find sentences such as this:

“Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being; not only is there no other composer capable of more freely developing lines or of more elaborate structures of tonal mediation (wheresoever the line goes, Bach is there also), but no one as compellingly demonstrates that the infinite is beauty and that beauty is infinite.”

Poor, poor Archbishop!

It's gloomy and dismal in New York right now, but I take comfort in the fact that I am not Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. You'd think that being the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion would be something of a cushy job, but that's just not the case, certainly not now, with the American Episcopal church and the conservative African bishops at each others' throats. I'm sure that Archbishop Williams, a theologian and poet, doesn't want to go down in history as the man who let the Anglican church fall apart, but it looks like it might happen. So when things get bad, I think to myself: at least I'm not the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Then, last week, in a speech and a BBC interview, Rowan Williams allegedly proposed “constructive accommodation” for Muslim communities in Britain who wish to use Sharia law. At least that's how the New York Times reported it. But at least the Times reporter added this:

“The archbishop’s speech was made at the Royal Courts of Justice, before an audience of leading judges and lawyers. Typically, it was steeped in historical and philosophical nuances that risked being lost in the headlines.”

It seems that other newspapers were not so kind. There were calls for resignation. There was a delightful Chaucer spoof (“Whan in Februar, withe hise global warmynge / Midst unseasonabyl rain and stormynge…”). Spengler was vividly critical:

“Violence is oozing through the cracks of European society like pus out of a broken scab. Just when liberal opinion congratulated itself that Europe had forsaken its violent past, the specter of civil violence has the continent terrified. That is the source of the uproar over a February 7 speech by Archbishop Rowan Williams, predicting the inevitable acceptance of Muslim sharia law in Great Britain.”

I'll admit a cynical thought that crossed my mind: the Archbishop is trying to lose his job! He wants to get kicked out for something that doesn't have to do with gay bishops! But then I read the speech. Philosophical nuances indeed.

I wonder if the Archbishop could have made the same point using a less controversial example. His basic point seems to be that if the law treats religious duties as voluntary, it can't make sense of the claims of religious people for exceptions: religious holidays, conditions for employment, etc. There is, I think, an implicit condition running through the entire speech: if certain people are duty-bound to abide by religious law, and this does not bring them into serious conflict with the spirit of the national law, and religious authorities can tell the court that these obligations aren't frivolous or imaginary, then the courts should take these obligations seriously. A judge could distinguish, for example, between a Catholic doctor who won't perform an abortion, even to save a life, and a Catholic doctor who won't perform a tracheotomy, even to save a life.

Williams wanted to avoid the difficulties of the “primitivist” reading of Sharia in order to focus on the theoretical aspects of law and communal identity. It's right there in the beginning:

“Even when some of the more dramatic fears are set aside, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes.” (emphasis added)

To which one could conceivably respond: what if in reality these dramatic fears are entirely justified? (This question is, of course, not one that I can answer.)

In the BBC interview, Williams seems very confident that there exists an interpretation of Sharia law that is largely compatible with the British common law tradition, citing Muslim scholars and legal theorists. But what of the situation on the ground? I don't know anything about religious life in Great Britain, and I don't think I learned anything from this speech.

I am so glad that I am not the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Culture, culture, culture...

My good friend Hope has requested that I resume posting, so I'll give it another shot, assuming that I can think of anything to say (and that I can finish learning how to type in DVORAK).

I love very much the old fellows over at Touchstone's Mere Comments, and never more than when they get cranky. I can't possibly do what they do, but it's not that I disagree with them. It's more that I don't have the life experience or years of pent-up frustration to write such beautiful diatribes: vibrant denunciations that, at moments, rise to the effect of poetry. Of course, for every jeremiad, they write scores of constructive posts, but these don't usually go beyond the realm of the very interesting. Incidentally, I've considered posting on their message board, but the folks who post regularly can be fairly ferocious.

One example was S.M. Hutchens's “Reverie in E Minor,” in which he discussed the havoc his generation wrought on the music of church culture.

“My generation, my abysmally stupid and culpably foolish generation, had the opportunity to keep the good--for there was very much good here--discard the bad, and bring in a golden age of church music, an age of beauty and invention, now in obedient harmony with the Great Tradition, with good theology instead of bad, and with an eye trained upon the history of whole Church and its music. Instead, however, it went as bad as it possibly could, seizing upon all the old mistakes it could find and amplifying them.”

I am no fan of the Baby Boomers – thanks for the Social Security burden and the national debt, jerks! – and it always warms my heart to see them called “abysmally stupid and culpably foolish,” but I probably shouldn't be too hasty to judge until we see how my generation turns out. The more interesting question is whether or not Mr. Hutchens is correct in his judgment of rock music:

“Instead of turning their people toward the richness of the Christian musical tradition, their teachers spent their time justifying and promoting the music of rebels and drug addicts, now half-converted into something called ‘Christian rock.’”

And a few paragraphs later:

“The argument is that bringing them in will get them to heaven--but how can you show them heaven when you are presiding over a little piece of hell--a place where people are given vast quantities religious stimulation under the name of the “gospel,” the end of which can only be the a vast burned-over district where they have been effectively inoculated against Christianity by Evangelical religion, just as one is inoculated against Mozart by a steady diet of rock, or the realities of the world, including its beauties, by drug-eating, or against the power of words by overwhelming waves of pictures?”

Rock music: created by rebels and drug addicts to inoculate the youth of the world against Mozart. As someone who likes the stuff, I'm loathe to agree with him, but I think that I have to do it. Last night, I listened to the first hour or so of Bach's Mass in B Minor, wishing that I could understand it better than I do. Some mathematical types love Bach, and it's not hard to see why. But even with the words and liner notes in front of me, I had trouble keeping my mind on the music. I don't have the descriptive vocabulary to follow the music in its intricacies, and my ear's patience has no doubt been destroyed by several years of listening to Guided By Voices. Ah, well. There's time yet for me.

So, I thought I had my fix for the week, until I came across Dr. Tony Esolen's “The World that Has No Music in its Soul.” He starts from the wonderful article that writer/composer Webster Young published in the latest Intercollegiate Review, which was, in fact, the article that gave me the inclination to get out my Bach CDs. At any rate, Dr. Esolen argues that Webster Young's hopes for a revival of a “common language” for classical music may be premature:

“When Palestrina wrote his Masses, he was inspired by prayers that washerwomen and plowboys had heard every week of their lives; it was part of their common, lived experience. Without that inspiration from something beyond Renaissance Italy, and something the composer shared with all kinds of people who were not composers or singers, you do not get the exalted music and theology of the Credo of the Mass for Pope Marcellus. . .

“But what happens when you don't have a culture? I've argued this before, but it bears repeating. I'm taking the word literally. You have a culture when you cultivate those beliefs, customs, celebrations, and virtues you hold most dear; and in this sense culture is by nature conservative and often proudly local. That's why totalitarian systems despise it; it stands in the way of the flattening of variety that the modern state demands. But this consumer society of ours despises it, too. It stands in the way of the itch for the new-and-improved, for novelty for the sake of vanity. The last hundred years, in part through no consciously evil plan, has seen the gradual replacement of culture with mass entertainment.”

Read the full essays for the full effect. I'm not optimistic that my generation can do any better, but at least it's nice to hear a warning from the older crowd.