ya gotta be kidding me file #3225918375

Lifelike funerals

H/T Steve Thorngate at Christian Century

HUH?

Honesty time:  I drafted this back in July, pre-family vacation (fun had by all, btw), pre-Robin Williams suicide, pre-ISIL beheadings and child marriages, pre-Ferguson.  So there are more pressing matters at hand. Nevertheless, because our world seems like it's falling apart at the seams just now these outlandish attempts to script our lives beyond the grave seem so, well, ridiculous. As if we have that much power.  We do, as the headlines indicate, though, possess the power and will to each other egregious harm, violence, and death.  We rightly wrestle with discerning effective plans of action.

Lifelike funerals, though, remind of the Polish phrase:
nie twój cyrk, nie twoje małpy (not your circus, not your monkeys)

if it's good enough for the students, it's good enough for the blog readers

I teach college.  I've been at it for about twenty years.  It was and remains the one job I've sought and desired.  Some kids grow up wanting to jump out of airplanes, quarterback a football team, or become President.  Once I arrived at Wabash, I knew I wanted to follow in the footsteps of those teaching me.

Cutting to the current semester, my Ethics and Values students will be contributing posts to a course blog.  (Sorry--this will be a private, students-only blog not available on Blogger or anywhere else.)  To give them some idea of what I had in mind, I drummed up the following.  It runs on *much* longer than what they're expected to do, but it hopefully establishes some parameters.

For those who find this stuff interesting, please add a comment.  Before you get angry, though, do remember here I'm blogging for a student audience.

If you want something done right....
do it yourself.  Or at least show folks what you have in mind.

So here goes. Curious about this blog assignment?  Read through this once or twice and then construct your own.  My first post (because who knows? maybe I'll post a couple more...) will be longer than your 150-250 word requirement.

First, a couple things:  a) social media--if you're on Facebook and/or Twitter, feel free to connect at www.facebook.com/pages/Spiritual-Diabetes/ and @SpiritualDiabet.  I have another blog at http://spiritualdiabetes.blogspot.com/.  You are not required any of these.  Just FYI...  b) keep the old 1980s song in mind: "Show me, Don't Tell me";  work on weaving together your argument with the sources you use.  Embed your link (so we can access it) and then start commenting.  That's the "show";  if it's just a rant, then you're merely "telling."

St Pius X memorial

Post over at the St Joseph's Theology blog.  St Pius X, pray for us!

holding pattern

Folks--
There will be fewer posts through the rest of the summer.  Writing, traveling, and family....

Best wishes, peace and all good for all!

cathedral-ic response

One of Mark Shea's readers inquired about Medjugorje and the apparent lack of authoritative declaration from Rome.  Shea's response hits all the right chords--Rome doesn't rush anything, look how look it took to declare certain Christological affirmations and then there's Trent, the not-so-speedy-response to the Protestant Reformation.  Shea couches all this with language about the Ents, the ancient-of-days, slow-moving tree-people from Tolkien's Middle Earth.  The Ents took their time--slow from the hobbits' perspective, but actually swift from their own--and when they did act, they did so decisively and turned the battle for the good.  Shea's conclusion:

Bottom line: when the Ents finally get past hooming and homming and finally speak, the bishops who referred the matter to them will be totally and completely vindicated.  The trick will be figuring out a way to break this to the honest and good people who have been lied to so that they listen to the Church  and do not, like victims of Stockholm Syndrome, identify with the crooks and liars who have snookered them with this fraud for thirty years.  It’s a pastoral issue, not a truth issue, that is primarily the problem here.

At some point the obligatory "I'm a Catholic blogger so here are my two cents on Tolkien" post will appear.  For now, though, Shea's use of the Ents as an analogy for "thinking with the Church" reminded me of European cathedrals, especially the Roman basilicas (this perhaps because those were the ones I saw first, thanks to a semester abroad in college).  The space, the sheer physical scale, and for Rome the physical and archeological connections to the ancient Roman past, and yet throughout a great attention to detail and personal expression (one example out of a gazillion:  Pope Leo XIII's tomb at St. John Lateran) are supposed to blow your mind.  The Barthians out there will kill me, but this is the one time when I understood Schleiermacher's "feeling of absolute dependence."  But in the bigness there's also all that detail and thus it takes time to digest it all.  Anybody's who's been on a pilgrimage tour to Rome (or Paris or London or Moscow or Prague or Madrid...etc) knows this point:  there's too much to see in one trip.  So you must return.

In like fashion, responses from the Roman authorities take time.  It's as if they, in responding to real pastoral crises as mentioned above as well as all-too-real theological crises, too, need  to construct a "cathedral" in their response.  By comparison, Protestant churches--which by style and theology benefit from a "quick response," or as I've said, a "sugar-high" spirituality (feels good for a short time, then comes the crash)--have the flash response but little depth or sustainability.  True, sometimes the cathedrals need work and restoration and, equally true, we pilgrims don't always understand every nook and cranny within, but the cathedral--space or response--is worth the wait.

Mark Shea goes digging

and I'm glad he does because he finds things like this.

subterranean connections

Geez, one blog post about Jesus Christ Superstar and then stuff hits the fan.  Steve Webb, the prolific and flamboyant columnist at First Things, fires a salvo:  Christians, especially Roman Catholic ones, need to ditch their distaste for 'praise music."  Webb:

I suspect Christians dislike praise music for the same reasons as the unchurched. The words are too simple, direct, and demanding, the emotions too transparent. Musical sophistication often means little more than genre compartmentalization, which leads many musically sophisticated Christians to try to keep their listening habits separate from their prayer life.

There is a bias among many rock aficionados against any contemporary music that makes the lyrics audible, indeed, that subordinates the tune to the words. Christians should not buy into that. It is especially sad, I think, when Christians immersed in hard rock turn their noses up (or shut their ears to) any music that is uplifting, as if only dark sounds are authentic.

Webb makes two good points here:  "we" (the sophisticated churched and our cultural counterparts, the equally if not more sophisticated unchurched [hipsters]) detect the sappy and immediately, instinctively, turn away.  Back in the 80s the "college music" crowd adored anything by REM but winced anytime pop music surfaced. "Real" music was, by definition, partially, if not wholly, unintelligible.  The bright and clear was necessarily a lie.  Hence Webb's second point:  it's only good if it's dark and dismal.  Unspoken satire here:  we really do like French existentialist ennui.   Oh, the misery that is life!  This Webb seeks to root out of American Catholicism:

Cynicism is a far greater spiritual danger than naiveté. And if you are Roman Catholic, what’s the worst that can happen to you? You might learn that you actually like singing, and you might take that lesson to the mass.