superstition or clear-eyed reason

Turns out that maybe we're better off living in a world we enchant (falsely) on our own than sit around pretending we have it all figured out.   We know how well that works out.  See David Hammond's post about Halloween, Cardinal Newman, and the movie Vertigo over at the St Joseph's College Theology blog.

What's that noise?

Religion, as it turns out.  Here's Art Remillard, an emerging scholar of American religion and culture, with a post by David Krueger reviewing Isaac Weiner's new book Religion Out Loud.

Krueger:

For the Pentecostal street preachers, turning up the volume was the means by which they proselytized the community. In this instance, it wasn’t the content of the religious speech that was most important. The services were conducted in Spanish, but most of the youth targeted by the church members spoke only English. Nonetheless, the church’s occupation of the sonic landscape (sonicscape?) for a few hours on a summer evening symbolized to many the presence of God.

Read it all here.

Roman Catholic street missionaries in the 1930s and 1940s pursued the same agenda.  They'd roll into a small southern or midwestern town, unpack the trailer chapel (seen, of all places, in Lilies of the Field starring Sidney Poitier), hook up their speakers, and start the Mass.  Sometimes they'd make converts, other times they'd have water balloons thrown at them.  Read about that phenomenon in American Catholic life here.   Weiner, Krueger, and Remillard recognize this trope in so many other places.  A good blog read and what looks like a great book, too.

One of the best Lilies scenes, of course, occurs when Homer Smith (Poitier) trains the exiled German nuns in the "Amen" chorus.  That's not Poitier singing, but rather composer Jester Hairston's voice.  Hairston arranged traditional African-American spirituals for several other Hollywood productions.   Here's your sound of religion at work.  That scene appeared in 1964;  within a decade suburban white parishes across the nation had appropriated it for youth choruses.  Remillard and company are onto something perhaps more elemental, which the motor missions priests understood, too.  Sometimes increased volume helps spread the message.  Let those with ears....

Just who is in charge here?

Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University in Atlanta, surveys the currently sad state of humanities and concludes:  It's your own damned fault.

If you believe that the Great Books comprise human thought and creation in their highest expression, it’s not enough to preserve them as an option on the menu, where they might fall alongside courses in robots on TV and Harry Potter (yes, juniors and seniors studying English at Emory last semester are enjoying these classes). Your conviction demands more than inclusion. A heterogeneous jumble of classic and contemporary, traditional and multicultural, Eurocentric and “otherly,” sounds like a positive expression of enlightened liberality, but in truth it is a confession of apathy. They just don’t care.

Furthermore, the humanities in this view have become (how it's not very clear) the purview of the wealthy elite.  Therefore, to the extent that they do so, 'we' (i.e., everybody else, apparently) can and should get rid of them.  

Museums and concert halls maintain paintings, manuscripts, ballets, and folk music, but Reich registers only a “lifestyle.” To him, arts institutions have no humanistic meaning, only a social meaning. Nothing inside the buildings would interest the poor, he implies, even if they had the chance to enter. Many artists inside were themselves poor and marginal, while artworks portray domestic scenes or impart religious content which the poor revere, but that makes no difference. People in East Harlem want food, Reich would say, not inspiration. Reich’s policy proposal makes perfect sense given his class-based impression of the art space—a pure and simple redirection of money is in order.

The parallel with literature professors who underscore the identity elements in Whitman and Millay and overlook poetic language and moral depths (unrelated to identity) is clear. Did they realize, however, that as they did so an analogous redistribution would happen in the curriculum, one that would damage their departments? 

So therefore, "don't cry for me, humanities," because the dilemma you face, Bauerlein argues, stems from the decisions you yourselves have made.

Read it all here.

it's Halloween so that must mean we blog about zombies

Zombies!  They're not just for scaring the undergraduates any more!

No, as Steve Kolowich observes, they're becoming big academic business.  Turns out that rather obvious jokes about a coming zombie apocalypse hit real fears that some as-yet-unknown pandemic will engulf us all.  Anxiety--now that's something academics can tap into.  This means that philosophers and the like start writing.  Kolowich's great concluding line:

"In some corners of academe, real zombies are unnecessary: the brains eat themselves."

Indeed. Read it all here.  And don't say I didn't warn you.

the hits just keep coming

Rod Dreher, regularly cited on this blog, commented on Philip Jenkins' "Last Episcopalian" post last week.  The results, apparently, were dramatic.  Dreher received one comment so long and insightful he gave it its own post.  A former United Methodist pastor weighs in on what drags down so many church organizations...

(When I left the UMC ministry – my district superintendent told me that he (along with over half of his colleagues) was on anti-depressants and that he suspected that when he retired he wouldn’t need them anymore.)

 

Understand – I’m not against anti-depressant medication – it can literally be a lifesaver for folks suffering from clinical depression – but he was telling me that his job environment was so toxic that he needed to drug himself to cope (and frankly saw no irony in that fact). This is just symbolic of the denial that so many in leadership in these denominations live in. Our annual conferences were multi-day exercises in self congratulation and furrowed brow deliberation over countless resolutions that accomplished nothing other than solidify the entrenched political power of the denominational apparatchiks. Clueless old-school church politicians fighting over the remaining scraps of organizational power deluding themselves into thinking all is well.

and Dreher extends that to organizations in general.

People from outside the bureaucratic structure typically have no idea how much being on the inside affects the way you see things. A good friend of mine worked for a big company that, because of changing market conditions, began losing a significant amount of business. He was in management there, and told me that the leadership class within the company was truly concerned about what they could do to turn around their situation. The thing was, all their proposed solutions favored what the managerial elites wanted to do in the first place. That is, they would consider no possible measures that would mean doing something that challenged their own settled convictions, and certainly nothing that would harm their own perceived internal interests.

Result: .... the management ... was so immersed in its own bubble that it did not understand how blinded it was by its own interests.

Since it's Reformation Day (i.e., Halloween), let's have a little more:

Don’t forget the late historian Barbara Tuchman’s elements that are present in all great and consequential institutional collapses (e.g., her account of how six Renaissance popes allowed conditions within the Catholic Church to degrade so much that the Reformation happened):

1. obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents

2. primacy of self-aggrandizement

3. illusion of invulnerable status

Again, this is not a Christian thing, specifically, but a function of bureaucratic mindsets within government, industry, academia, and all complex social entities. Being religious does not liberate you from being human. It can, though, convince you that whatever you’re doing as a leader within a religious bureaucracy must be right, because you are serving God. I’ll never forget the case in which a Catholic bishop told an adult victim of a priest’s sexual abuse — the priest was the woman’s confessor, and used information he gained in the confessional to blackmail her, a married woman, into a sexual relationship — that if she went to the authorities with this story, he, her bishop, would ruin her, “because I have to protect the people of God.” True story.

Pretty sobering stuff.  The Fall is real, folks.  No, I don't mean in a simplistic fashion, but that our humanity--intrinsically good and imbued with dignity and freedom by and from God--now can't help shoot itself in the foot.  Repeatedly.  And at the darnedest times.  We see this in our personal lives and relationships, and yes, Virginia, you can see it in the lives of nations.  We are capable of such good--and occasionally we come close to achieving it.  And at other times we seem capably only of screwing up things further, even as we claim to be helping.  Worth considering on this the 497th anniversary of the beginning of Protestantism.  No, we can't save ourselves.  Only God can do that--and Trent agreed.   God also gave us the Church and, despite the obvious problems as dictated above, that is the avenue through which we experience the justification God alone gives.


Read it all here.

restore us again, O Lord...

Over at the St Joseph's College Theology blog, Father Frank Donio, SAC, provides a great reminder:  pray.    Father Donio writes:

Fervent prayer, ardent prayer, in the way that Pope Francis is calling for is an on-going dialogue with God throughout our day, an awareness of the action and activity of the Holy Spirit permeating our lives. It is a seeking for God and finding God in all things, in every moment and in every place. St. Teresa of Avila encourages us to be seekers of God and St. Ignatius of Loyola calls us to “find God in all things.” St. Vincent Pallotti puts the two aspects together, as was often his way, and challenges us to:

“Seek God and you will find God.Seek God in all things and you will find God in all things.Seek God always and you will always find God.”

Read it all here.

Pope Paul VI and the martyrs

This past Sunday's installment over at the St Joseph's College of Maine theology blog.  Coming up this weekend:  the St Joseph's Symposium on the Second Vatican Council.  Highlights next week.

And then will start some reflections--along with catching up on what should've been a busy month of blogging, lots to blog about--about Blessed Pope Paul's legacy.  There's far more there, I've discovered, than just a second name for another pope or two.  Blessed Paul, pray for us!