AKMA’s Random Thoughts

This Morning’s Sermon

I preached today at Seabury. I know, I usually let readers in on the preparation phases, but I just didn’t have the time or temper to process my thoughts in public last night. I’m preaching Sunday, too, so maybe I’ll work on that one in full view.

Anyway, I’ll post the sermon in the “read more” portion of the entry. I was thinking of Marek J as I wrote it; I could not end with a direct quotation from the mastermind of Kombinat!, but I came as close as I thought decorum, piety, and rhetoric would permit me.

Anderson Chapel of St. John the Divine, Seabury-Western

Daniel 3:14-20, 24-28/John 8:31-42

March 31, 2004

If you remain in my word, you are truly my disciples.

Jesus doesn’t teach us, in John’s Gospel, exactly how we might come into his word. Perhaps it’s when we are baptized; perhaps when we are born from above, not by the will of flesh or the will of men, but of the will of God; perhaps when hear and believe, or when first we testify that Jesus is the Son of God. But however, whenever we enter into Jesus’ word, he urges us to stay with him, to come along and see; he teaches us not simply to cling to a single spasmodic moment of conversion, but truly to show ourselves to be his disciples by remaining, abiding in his word. If we have begun to pronounce Jesus’ word with our lips, from deep in our heart, if we dare to express Jesus’ word with our lives — we need to speak the whole word, not just a mumbling first syllable. We need to abide, not merely to visit Jesus, as though discipleship were a theological theme park. Discipleship isn’t a Motel 6, an overnight refuge for busy spiritual travelers who have more important things to do the next day; discipleship is our home, where we remain.

And you will know the truth. . . .

Oddly, John offers us the opportunity to recognize the truth, but not as the condition for taking up Jesus’ way. Instead, Jesus promises the truth to us as the effect of our faithfulness; his followers believed, in order that they might understand the truth. Just as sometimes we don’t know what we’re saying until we’ve blurted it out — so when the Spirit moves us to broach the word of Jesus, when unbidden faith comes to faith-impaired tongues, there’s nothing to do but spill out the words whose truth we can’t yet claim. We try on faith, we venture a word or two in this strange new language, and after we’ve begun conversing in faith, acting on faith, after our lives have acquired the accent that comes with this heavenly dialect, then we can tell that we’ve been grasped by the truth, that truth has begun thinking through us, and — when we open ourselves to the possibility — the truth pours itself out in our words and actions.

As we continue in the word that Jesus taught us, loving one another as he loved us, yielding rather than coercing, enduring what we must and protecting what we can — as we continue in the word, and recognize the truth, the truth may break down, break apart, break out of all the encrusted certainties that support and confine us. We will have to give up the illusion of control to which we mortals so desperately cling, but that’s how it is with the truth. We can’t control the truth, we can’t dictate terms to the truth, and if we try to use the truth to merely temporal purposes, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we relinquish control, if we turn the truth loose to blow where it will, if we take those first hesitant steps out into the brilliant openness of the light that shines from the word — we will know the truth.

And the truth will make you free.

But it won’t be easy.

Amen

What is a Weblog?

Shelley’s recent post reminded me of the good ol’ [sterile] debate about the essence of a weblog, but — much as I agree with her (“Might as well ask, what is proper writing and hope to find a universal answer that will satisfy everyone”) — today I’m going to just link-comment-and-post.

So, first (or “second,” since Shelley was first), Micah pointed me to a story about cost-saving for college textbooks. Micah noticed it because of the rant he’s heard from me over and over about the opportunity for the Disseminary to function as a textbook depot, and (ideally) as a by-chapter textbook depot. We’re trying top scare up a grant to commission chapters for a hypothetical textbook (on any of a number of relevant topics) — the premise being that once a given collection of chapters has been assembled, we can also collect alternative chapters, so that an instructor could select the constituent elements of the textbook she’s using, even the order in which they appear, and call for print-on-demand copies if she so desires. If you have a generous backer, we’ll name the textbook after them.

Jeremy pointed me toward interesting-looking papers that I won’t have time to read, from a University of Canterbury (NZ) conference on technology.

Vergil Iliescu pointed me to an articulate apologia pro vita sua by Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia. As I read the Justice’s words, it seemed increasingly likely that the present stresses over sexuality in the church will not be resolved by new arguments, or even by new attention to arguments that presently have been relegated to the sidelines of the public strutting contest. Rather, I think that it will settle out based on people’s sense of with whom they would want to align themselves. Most of the facile arguments have already been drilled into our heads; most of the subtle arguments fail to command the kind of traction that could make someone change the direction of their thinking; but sooner or later, people will begin to say, “Aw, they can’t be that bad,” or “I just have to stick with this group no matter what.”

The vocational theologian in me regrets that, but the regular human being (supposing such a spirit to subsist in me at all) thinks that’s about par for the course.

I had a great talk with David Akins of the Toronto Globe and Mail this morning about the Lessig phenomenon. If I end up in print, I’ll impose on my friends in Accordion City to save a copy of the page for me.

Finally, for tonight, Jordon just put together a simple, effective, useful church website in a few minutes on a free hosting service. Now (a) be it granted that Jordon saying “ no knowledge of html needed” may be comparable to Ken Dryden saying “no knowledge of hockey needed,” and (b) I would set as an absolute first step the acquisition of a durable domain name for the church, so that you might be able to change providers without redirecting all over creation, but Jordon shows that the basics are indeed free, are indeed easy, and if you read the comments to my initial post, there’s just no reason on earth why a congregation shouldn’t have a website. Not having a church website is like locking the church doors, so that only members can get in.

Time For Bifocals

I thought the (boldface) headline on the cover of today’s issue of Digital ID World read, “Can RFID Live up to the Hypo”?” It got me thinking of injectable identity tags. It gives new meaning to computer operators as “users. . . .”

Times Changing

Micah and I were wondering, the other night, when the last film strip will have been shown to the last bored classroom full of elementary-school kids? I recall none of the content of those tedious audio-visual exercises — but the thought always calls to mind the Firesign Theatre’s segment on the American Revolution (from Everything You Know Is Wrong), which always sounded to me like “Nerdy Clockwork Films”: “An alternate past. . . for an alternate future.”

How Was Your Weekend?

Ummm. . . . wild.

The short version runs this way: The Lessig Audiobook project took off with much more energy than I anticipated when I drifted off to sleep Friday night. After a frenzy of offers, suggestions, inquiries, and updates, the following have developed:

Dave Winer has archived a heap o’ files, which he lists in his comment to the previous progress report.

Eric Rice has archived another heap at his place.

A. J. Wright has arranged that SunSite at archive the audiobook, too.

Doug Kaye has posted a segment of IT Conversations on the project, including interviews with Larry Lessig and Simon Carless (of LegalTorrents and Archive.org.

Hats off to everyone who’s taken part, whether by reading, hosting, downloading, encouraging, linking, promoting, or just reading with interest. We still need versions of chapters Six, Ten, Thirteen, Fourteen, and the Afterword (as well as the extremely brief introductory sections to the “Property,” “Balance,” and “Afterword” sections.

I’d like to take note of a point Doug made, and ask that readers and (if possible) custodians add to the ID3 Comment field a note that says something such as, ”Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, published by Penguin Books, distributed under a Creative Commons license . Chapter read by Suw Charman (or whomever).” We want not only to acknowledge Prof. Lessig’s work and Penguin Books’ courageous foresight, but also to underline the Creative Commons’s role in promoting a free culture.

[Later]: For some reason, the edit window of Moveable Type doesn’t want me to alter the main post from several days ago any more. Here’s the lineup of chapter files from the sources at which I last knew of them.

Preface: Kevin Marks, available here

Introduction: Raph Levien, available here

Intro to the “Piracy” section (thanks for noticing this!): Chris Farmer, available here

Chapter 1: Doug Kaye (download it here already! And it’s terrific), George’s version here (I’m glad they took this chapter; I’m not ready to try to pronounce doujinshi.)

Chapter 2: Victoria and A. J. Wright available here

Chapter 3: Victoria and A. J. Wright Now available here.

Chapter 4: Eric Rice (may be able to help with hosting), Adam Brault available here

Chapter 5: AKMA here it is

Chapter 6: Les Hall, Guan Yang (available here), and Adam Brault (available here)

Chapter 7: Michael Shook (probably can’t host) Available here.

Introduction to Property Section: Adam Brault, available here, Raph Levien available here.

Chapter 8: Suw Charman available here

Chapter 9: Tara now available here, Chuck Welch

Chapter 10: Giles Hoover

Chapter 11: Neel (can probably host it), Dave Winer (available now, here!)

Chapter 12: Dave Winer, available here

Intro to Balances: Raph Levien, here

Chapter 13: George and Jeneane Sesssum, available here

Chapter 14: Ted Fletcher, available here and David Weinberger, here

Conclusion: Enoch Choi, available here

Afterword: Linda and George, available here, and Tim Samoff, available here

Preliminary Aftermath

The Lessig Read-a-thon (as David Weinberger called it in an email) has taken off. The main post below will be the center of activity — it’ll keep life a little simpler if no one needs to hop around from URI to URI looking for news — but for the sake of a quick overview: We now have versions of the Introduction, Chapter One (here and here), Chapter Three, Chapter Five, Chapter Seven, Chapters Eleven and Twelve, and the Conclusion.

We have volunteers for most of the other chapters, and some volunteers who are asking, “What should I do?” The answer is: “Record the chapter of your choice.” There’s no reason not to have multiple alternatives for the chapters.

I would ask, though, that you start with a chapter that hasn’t been posted yet (at the moment, that’s Four, Six, Nine, Ten, Thirteen, Fourteen, and the Afterword). Other volunteers may have recorded them and not posted them yet, or planned to record them but haven’t gotten around to it, but we oughtn’t to just wait around.

Here are three four very kind offers: Dave Winer and Eric Rice and now Asheesh Laroia have offered to host chapters, and Noah Glass has offered the audblog.com service for readers who want to use that system for recording their chapters (I’m waiting for specific instructions from Noah — will post them as soon as I get them).

Eric and Dave, I invite you to download and post chapters as they become available unless the reader indicates some impediment to so doing (I take it that Doug’s Chapter One forms part of his ITConversations enterprise, so unless he explicitly offers us permission to host his recording, I’d think it poor form to take it from him, especially since George has generously provided an alternative). We can talk about the paradoxes of whether one should make a Commons-based performance available only from a restricted site some other time. Right now, I’m only pleased that people want to take part.

Thanks, everyone!

Why Churches Should Have Websites

First reason: “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.” Too many churches operate on the assumption that they should be like the comfy little restaurants where you stumble across them, fall in love with them, get to know the regulars, and hope no one else discovers them because that would ruin the ambiance.

The church should be all about standing out where it can be seen. Some of the people who might come to your church will only look online. Now, that’s good enough reason for having a website right there. (And to the dour parish expert who says, “Oh, no one around here would do that,” the correct response is “By not making the parish perceptible online, you’ve already guaranteed that no one will.” Online access and broadband access are both increasing at a rate that itself indicates that someone you want to reach is looking for your parish online.)

Not only that, but (a) these are visitors who have already set out to find your parish in one way or another. They’re not just passing by, they aren’t getting up to go to the bathroom while your expensive cable-access commercial is on TV, they came looking for your church. And (b), many people who set about looking for a church online come from a body of our neighbors who are disproportionately underrepresented in church (in Episcopal churches I know of, anyway).

So by taking the simple step of putting a web page on an ISP somewhere, with directions, service times, and a non-repellent design, a church will significantly increase the likelihood of being available to a would-be visitor when that visitor comes looking. (Which would our hypothetical visitor prefer to encounter: a simple web page, or a voice mail phone chain?)

Second reason: Because part of the value of a web page is its constituting a public self-definition of a congregation. “This is who we are, and what we stand for.” That definition serves not only to invite (or fend off) visitors, but also to help the congregation recognize its own reflection in the mirror of the culture. Of course, that works better if the self-identification is clear and honest, which can’t be said of every website. But even a deceptive site plays that role to some extent, since it communicates to parishioners the message that their congregation is living a lie, even if that’s the way (uh huh uh huh) they like it.

Third reason: The attention that an effective web site requires grows from, develops, nourishes, articulates, and extends the very energies that contribute to vital parish life. A web site should be all about communication, quite public communication. A good site helps a congregation with an overview of what’s going on. It provides visitors with a sense of what kinds of people and interests they’re likely to meet. Whether you make available recorded selections from your music life or not, you can signal a lot that your visitor may care about by how you characterize a parish’s music life.

More reasons: An easily-constructed, frequently-updated web site expresses, generates, reflects, and encourages a conversational sense of what the congregation is about. A living congregation partakes of many of the characteristics of a good, long, satisfying conversation; why not permit those positive characteristics to show online?

I haven’t used the word “rural” yet — but I think all these apply to rural churches at least as much as (if not more than) suburban or urban churches. The need for deliberate information-spreading increases as the likelihood that you’ll spontaneously bump into another parishioner (or potential newcomer) on the street.

I’ll think of more reasons when I’ve had a good night’s sleep, and when I read the comments. Till then, that’s at least a start for my in-laws. Tomorrow I’ll try to look at my friend Holly’s church website and see whether I have anything useful to say about it. Goodnight, now!

Yes

Oliver Willis on the Bush administration’s eagerness to pin the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on Iraq:

To use an analogy: it is as if you're playing one-on-one with Michael Jordan, and MJ says "I am probably going to dunk on you". You then proceed to be dunked on, and your answer is "I bet Scottie Pippen did this!"

And then blaming the teammate who was yelling at you to guard MJ, maybe even foul him, for not covering your man. . . .

Let’s Start Something

Anyone feel like recording a chapter of Lawrence Lessig’s new book?

The license pretty clearly indicates that, so long as we’re not making a commercial venture of it, we can make a recording of (“perform”) the text. There are a Preface, Introduction, fifteen chapters, a conclusion and an afterword. If you’re willing to contribute an MP3 recording of a chapter (ideally, hosting it on your own server — but I’ll bet we can gird up the Disseminary to host chapters for you, if you can host it yourself — drop us a comment and let us know which chapters you’ll take. Heck, we could have duelling chapters; which version of chapter 5 do you like, Accordion Guy’s or Jenny the Shifted Librarian’s? (Disclaimer: I just typed their names in there. They haven’t offered or anything. Yet.) (Another disclaimer: When I went to Jenny’s just now to get her link, I saw that she had the same idea — and we didn’t even talk about it Wednesday night!)

If we all chip in, the effort will be minimal and the benefits great.

Later:

Here’s what we have so far:

Among those who have volunteered and specified chapters that they’ll try, we have:

Preface: Kevin Marks, available here

Introduction: Raph Levien, available here

Intro to the “Piracy” section (thanks for noticing this!): Chris Farmer, available here

Chapter 1: Doug Kaye (download it here already! And it’s terrific), George’s version here (I’m glad they took this chapter; I’m not ready to try to pronounce doujinshi.)

Chapter 2: Victoria and A. J. Wright available here

Chapter 3: Victoria and A. J. Wright Now available here.

Chapter 4: Eric Rice (may be able to help with hosting), Adam Brault available here

Chapter with Governess and Bodice-Ripping: Halley (I want to hear this)

Chapter 5: AKMA (done — here it is, hefty at 15.67 Mb; anyone should feel free to compress it if you see a way to)

Chapter 6: Les Hall, Guan Yang (available here), and Adam Brault (available here)

Chapter 7: Michael Shook (probably can’t host) Available here.

Chapter 8: Suw Charman available here

Chapter 9: Tara now available here, Chuck Welch

Chapter 10: Giles Hoover

Chapter 11: Neel (can probably host it), Dave Winer (available now, here!)

Chapter 12: Dave Winer, available here

Chapter 13: Jeneane Sesssum

Chapter 14: Ted Fletcher

Conclusion: Enoch Choi, available here

Afterword: Linda and George, available here

Notes (ahem!): techt

Executive Summary: Halley “Executive” Suitt (no, it’s pronounced to rhyme with “root,” not “bleat”

Graphic: David Weinberger

I’ll read an unclaimed chapter as soon as I have a chance to get over to my office; there’s not much chance of enough quiet to read a chapter here.

Can anyone recommend downloadable recording software? I’m set on my TiBook nusing AudioRecorder; what about Windows users? Dave says the sound recorder app that comes with Windows XP only records sixty seconds at a time. [Whoops! Dave found and recommends PolderbitS for Windows, so we’ll have him on board as soon as his neighbor shuts down the lawn mower. Lawn mower? There’s something to mow already?]

Now, here’s a question for Jenny or Liz (or from a different direction, for Adam) — how should we frame the ID3 tags? I suppose the “album” should be Free Culture. The Track Name should follow the designations in the text (such as, “Chapter 1: Creators”). Is the Artist the reader, or Lawrence Lessig? If the Artist is Lessig, does the reader go into “comments”? Or shall we put both into the Artist tag (such as “Lawrence Lessig and Halley Suitt”)? Might as well do it right from the outset.

Doug suggests the settings he used: “Encoded as 48kbps mono MP3 using a licensed encoder.”

Today Lessig, tomorrow Doctorow.

Night Out

I figured that everyone else would have filled megabytes of bandwidth with jolly pictures of boisterous, enthusiastic bloggers at Ben Pao yesterday evening. I figured that by the time I got around to blogging about it, everyone would already know. That’s what It thought; but I was wrong again. Sure, John mentions it, but no full account of the conversational free-for-all has yet appeared.

So I was wrong about everyone else, and I’m not the guy to supply what is lacking. I did arrive early, in time to spend fifteen minutes or so at the bar with Rick, Buzz, Jim, Erik, Barry Bayer, and John. Then at dinner, I sat in the same corner of the table almost the whole dinner, in between Jenny and Jim (with Jack on the yonder side of Jim).

I had a very helpful conversation with Jenny about my upcoming keynote at the Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace conference. I’m working on an argument that the changing information environment leaves most theological teachers persistently losing ground to circumstances that obstruct or deflect their attempts to engage new technologies productively. (That reminds me that I owe my mother-in-law a post about why even small rural churches should have websites, and what they should do, but I won’t get to that tonight. Sorry, Pat! I’ll try tomorrow.)

Case in point: almost all scholars who now conduct theological research online learned the craft of research in a physical environment. I describe some of the research strategies I used as a seminarian, some of the cues I looked for when seeking reliable information. Very few of those strategies transfer effectively to online research. But now many of my students conduct a great proportion of their research online; how shall we help shape their research initiatives, and how shall we learn from them how we might better teach (and conduct our own research)?

I mentioned to Jenny my seeded-search idea (middle of the linked post), and she suggested some helpful follow-ups, and put RSS into my mind as another tool I might invoke in the discussion.

Then Buzz came over and cleared Jim McGee out of his chair, and we talked a long time about David, Doc, PopTech, ActiveWords, Central Florida, and Pentecostal theology. Then he cleared me out so he could talk with Jenny; I fell into conversations with Jack and Rick, mostly, the rest of the way. Rick wants me to read the new Greg Iles book, and I agreed to add it to my list (but I didn’t tell Rick how long the list was).

Before Jim took Jack and me home, I had a chance to talk with Ernie, and even begin a polite argument about pseudonymity, before Jim dragged me home.

People were taking pictures and comparing Treos all through dinner; I’m surprised that no photos have showed up online yet. I did manage to get copies of several shots that Jenny attempted with her (flash-less) Treo:

That’s me, on the right, taking a bite of the delicious garlic tofu in that lower picture.

You Can’t Steal This Book

Lawrence Lessig’s new book, Free Culture, is available for free download under a Creative Commons license. Lessig encourages readers to “redistribute, copy, or otherwise reuse/remix this book provided that you do so for non-commercial purposes and credit Professor Lessig” — so if you feel the temptation to whip up a dance remix of this powerful critique of copyright culture, Lessig will be right there with you.

[It looks as though the Future of Ideas giveaway is still on as of today. If you don’t already have a copy, this is your chance to get one by making a donation to Creative Commons; if you do have a copy, you can get an autographed copy, or gifts for friends.]

A Little Bit of Meaning

The dumb movie ran late, we spent some time admiring Pippa’s most recent work of art (a full swinging-kitchen-door mural, both sides of the door), and now I don’t have the minutes of awakeness left to produce a fully-realized post on meaning. But to avoid putting it off for another day, I’ll begin what I wanted to say.

A couple of quick responses, first off. I think Dave and I just use the word “accountable” differently. I’m open to the likelihood that Dave has a case that his is righter, but I like my usage, it serves my purposes well, except when it nettles Dave. On this question of usage, I’ll offer politely to disagree with Dave.

The second quick response actually gets at the start of my fuller observations. When I say that if my two initial premises hold (that signifying is ubiquitous and uncontrollable), then my third (that there’s no ethic intrinsic to signifying) follows from them, I don’t mean that expression and interpretation are ethically neutral. No way (as the Apostle Paul would say)! Rather, I mean that the ethical status of our signifying practices derives not from a hypothetical nature of signification, but from other discursive regimes. One could well envision and uphold an Aristotelian ethics of signifying, or a Christian ethics of signifying (starting, perhaps, with the Epistle of James), or a liberal-democratic or an aesthetic ethics of signifying, but none of these would plausibly make a case that their ethic derives simply from the nature of signification.

In order to make an intrinsic ethic of signification work, one would have to be able to account for the vast and persistent domain of signifcation-slippage — to resolve, in other words, the perennial problems of intention, ambiguity, and misunderstanding. So far as my years and perception have enabled me to tell — and that’s not a universal boundary, so I await evidence that has thus far escaped me — the so-called “problem cases” of non-deliberate, ambiguous, and misapprehended signification constitute not a rare aberration, but a tremendous proportion of the cases of signification. I expect that a theory of signifying worth supporting would have a word to say about those cases.

Now, I will close my eyes. Goodnight.

Quiet in the Faculty Meeting

Alex IM’d me in the middle of a suspense movie (sorry I didn’t respond right away, Alex) to alert me that Invisible Adjunct has hung up her blog.

It’s tough to express how this news makes me sad; she showed the grace and clarity and integrity that call together all who have a sense for the issues she voiced, building a community of support and comfort for those working under comparably inhumane situations, and never permitting us who have been her comfortably full-timed colleagues the indulgence of slack consciences. That, as I recall, is the work of a prophet; and I will do what I can to ensure that the resonances of IA’s voice aren’t drowned out once the Faculty Senate resumes its monthly squabbling about who gets the parking spaces.

Antipathetic Magic

I hereby complain to the universe that somebody seems to have made off with my treasured autographed copy of The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode’s brilliant reading of the Gospel of Mark as a paradigmatic instance of narrative’s capacity to conceal as much as it reveals. You lend books to people you trust, and this is what happens.

(Now, allow me to observe that the above is an offical public complaint about others’ behavior relative to me — thus, I expect to find out in a matter of moments, that I am myself the one who mislaid the book, thus humiliating me for blaming others. That is, in fact, why I’m complaining about it publicly in the first place. OK, book, olly olly income free!)

[I was right; no one had borrowed Kermode, but he was resting on the bottom shelf of a bookshelf that had inadvertently been concealed by boxes in an effort to spruce up the basement. I withdraw my accusation, I repent in sackcloth and ashes, and I bask now in the joy of reading this exquisite critical exercise. Now, how can I choose only one chapter for my students to read?]

When I Said “Really,” What I Meant Was. . . .

Today was consumed by high-gear wrap-up from last term, a lightning strike to the Amtrak station in the heart of Chicago to pick up Margaret, and syllabus-prep for tomorrow’s new class. Here’s a question for you: what do you call a professor who, teaching a course for the umpty-umpth time, revamps the whole class yet again?

Don’t tell me your answer.

So I think about all those topics and what I need to say relative to them, but I haven’t had a minute free to write out what I’ve been thinking (much less, to write it out carefully). Not only have I not blogged substantively today, although if I keep going at this rate my repudiation of today’s blogging will count as a substantive blog, but I haven’t even read any blogs today. No, that’s not true, somehow I got pointed toward Dooce’s accounts of childbirth and lactation (and this one), which reminded Margaret and me of our experiences in these areas, only we didn’t experience them in such delicious prose.

I will try to get to the “meaning” stuff tomorrow.

Really, I Do

I had planned a blog about meaning, accountability, comments, and ethics. But my non-stop Sunday and the cold I haven’t yet beaten (phooey to you, Halley) caught up with me and I’m scarcely able to keep my eyes open long enough to excuse myself. . . .

Blogalgia

I have caught a nasty cold. It’s not worse than most people’s colds, but I catch colds relatively rarely, so I’m unduly cranky about it. It reminds me of the beginning of Kant’s “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wherein Kant complains that sometimes he gets a feeling of intellectual congestion like a stuffed nose of the brain, such that his mind can’t produce clear thought (I expected I’d be able to find a text of “The Conflict” online, but I can’t, not even in German, which makes me even grouchier, and I’m feeling too run-down to ransack the basement to find the copy I have somewhere in a box, so you’ll have to make do with a beclouded vague recollection of Kant’s analogy rather than a quotation.)

My beloved Margaret is in Rochester for 36 hours (and on Amtrak for, oh, another 30 hours, unless she’s lucky) to observe Nate in several performance opportunities. I’d have gone with her, except my last “Passion” gig for now is scheduled for tomorrow; it’s just as well I wasn’t with her on the train, as night train travel gets uncomfortable and un-sleep-able enough, but a coughing, snuffling, restless, ill-tempered lout (which I would have been) next to you will make the trip all the more miserable. That’s the upside for her, but for me it means that the sweetheart who coddles me in my affliction is away for a few days.

I have a pile of final exams to grade, which my wonderful students hand-wrote in bluebooks, some of them with handwriting so fine that it’s hard for my headachey eyes to focus on it. (One of my worries about grading involves the extent to which my temperament at the moment of evaluation might affect the grade I assign; will I show especially harsh judgment this afternoon?)

I have to prep for tomorrow’s “Passion According to John” hour.

Some aspects of my work situation have been especially irksome this week.

Si’s bandmates booted him out of the as-yet-unnamed group, destining themselves to a collective future of mediocrity and futility.

Did I admit that I’m feeling impatient and grouchy?

So y’all are just as well off that I’m not trying to be topical or profound just now. Maybe when my head clears, my revivified brain will have an interesting thought, but right now, I doubt it.

Blogitude

I could’ve blogged today — I want to get back to Gerry and Dave and the Tutor — but I just didn’t feel like it. Gave my Northwestern students their final exam; they were cheerful and sweet, not at all grumpy or whiny. I’ll miss them.

Tomorrow I’ll grade as many exams from that class as I can bear to, put Margaret on the train (to see Nate), and, oh, I don’t know, maybe I’ll really blog.

“Arrrrr, Elron!”

Margaret and I had a dinner date last night, wherein one of the topics of discussion was “Where do we fit on the Tom Coates typology?”

Margaret decided that she is probably a ninja dwarf of a somewhat elven sort; I, on the other hand, felt more like a ninja elf, though a rather task-oriented elf, and a little on the piratical side for a ninja. I’m not acquainted with any of the people in Tom’s upper-right-hand quadrant, but I suppose I’d fit in close to Dan Hon or Lance Arthur.

Walking home, we encountered a panhandler who pretended to be selling Streetwise, the local newspaper for homeless vendors. We paid for our copy, but the vendor suggested that we think of it as a “donation” and let him keep his last copy of the paper (which we did).

As we wandered along toward home, we turned to one and I noted sadly, “He’s not supposed to do that,” to which Margaret responded, “I know; do you think we’re saying that because we’re ninjas?”

(Nate adds, “I guess I’m a ninja,” and I’d say he’s toward the middle of dwarf and elf (not surprisingly, given his ancestry.)

LazyWeb

So OK, who’s going to be first with a utility that permits webcam users to blue-screen out their surroundings and paste in a jpeg of the user’s choice as a background?

I look forward to iSight messaging with people from in front of St. Paul’s (perhaps with Gary and Fiona approaching in the background), or from the interior of Christ Church, Oxford, or in front of a group of technorati from BloggerCon or DigID World. . . .

Less Random Semi-Thoughts

One of the wonderful gifts from blogging comes when your friends offer you the benefit of their wisdom (sometimes under the guise of saying what they thought you already knew). Tom, for instance, called into question “the part about ‘we’ being somehow distinct from the realm of signification, the way we are distinct from wildfires and other natural forces.”Tom goes on to wonder to what extent we’re distinct from “signification” on one hand and “forces of nature” on the other. Great, great! There are (of course) rough-hewn ways to make those distinctions work, just as there are rough-hewn (and finely-polished) ways to make “intention” work as a criterion, and so on. But Tom’s on the right path, the one that leads to trouble: the rhetoric of obvious distinction represses all the problematic complications that might arise if we looked to closely at the supposed dividing lines.

So, after learning this from Tom, what should I say? Perhaps best to say that when we broach the topic of signifying, we enter a discourse where the recursive character of our expressions and their topics play havoc with the rules. It marks a space where brutal discursive exploitation and radical semiotic trust and intimacy come into play — one reason poets seem to know this terrain so much better than most philosophers.

David nudges me relative to my suggesting (in David’s words) “that there’s no ‘real’ signification that we can authoritatively unearth. Our simple model of communication (inner thought expressed in outer signs) misrepresents the actual situation.” Then, he wonders, should we not be held accountable for the effects of our deliberate significations? (Let’s talk about defining “signifies” as “projects meaning,” but not tonight, okay?)

Sure thing — I am, as Si would have said last year and I don’t know what he’s saying this year instead, all about accountability. Indeed, absent a durable principle of intentionality as the criterion for “real” meaning, I think accountability is all we have left — not only for our deliberate sginficiations, but our inadvertent ones, too. That feels intuitively unfair; the “I didn’t mean to” defense has a long and deeply-embedded history in our social fabric. I’ll venture to suggest, though, that once we admit that intention doesn’t serve us reliably in most such respects, that it’s a necessary placeholder for an unspecifiable factor (and yes, I read Anscombe, which is partly what made me this way), then invoking the unreliable placeholder to exculpate or incriminate runs the risk of compounding the imprecise with the undeterminable. At the end of all our conversations (verbal or gestural or digital), we come to accountability: do we step up and acknowledge that we’re implicated in the various networks of ramifications that flow from our signifying practice, or do we retreat, cover our hinder parts, and endeavor to immunize ourselves from our infiliation in webs we did not make or choose. (I vote for accountability, then, rather than self-justification.) So then, the radical fluidity of signification doesn’t excuse us from responsibility; rather, it radicalizes our responsibility, requiring that we acknowledge the full extent of our participation in the economy of signs, and asking whether we then stand by the meanings we’ve participated in constructing and affirming, or whether we deny our selves.

Chris (in an email) asks, “How does what you're saying differ from what I imagine to be the First Step of a 12-step program for New Age Nihilists: ‘Came to believe I was powerless over the fact that shit happens’ ”?

I suppose that my point converges with this Twelve-Step program — but the myth of control so pervades the discourses within which I spend most of my time and energy working, that it’s worth reminding myself (and innocent bystanders) how tenuous that myth turns out to be. Indeed, often enough it’s tremendously destructive, as people cling to a dysfunctional “control” for fear of a chaos that they posit as the alternative. All the while they wreak havoc for which they don’t feel accountable, since they’re doing it in the name of fending off chaos. But that chaos may not be the only alternative, or may be only a phase thourgh which a different order is passing, or some other possibility that the fear-driven controller can’t see. Let it go, let it go. (Here I hear resonances of Eric’s shower-inspired ruminations that I want to take up tomorrow, after a night’s sleep, ’cause his post makes me want to think in a different direction. He’s way off base about that “brilliant” stuff, though.)

Chris doesn’t ask about the correlation between “signification” and the Higher Power about which twelve-step programs speak (and the God about whom theologians speak). Short answer: it’s far from being adventitious, but I want vigorously to avoid equating the two (three) or suggesting that one is a less-refined version of another. Maybe I’ll have something sensible to add to that tomorrow, in between grading final exams and other errands. In the meantime, thanks for making me think more, and harder.

Classic and Free

Anyone with an interest in fine digital type on a low budget must rush over to Igino Marini’s digital type page and download his collection of digital recreations of the Oxford Fell typefaces. He’s licensing them for free, provided that you keep him apprised of how you’re using his work. The faces are full, with abundant ligatures, ornaments, and special characters, and the pirce can’t be beat.

Especially churches and other not-for-profits who anticipate someday, under some circumstances, needing a sturdy, authentic, affordable period typeface should download these and keep them on hand. I can’t wait to set something in them, myself. . . .

Last In Line

Everyone’s already seen “The Gospel of Debbie” by now, but for the one person who might not have seen it yet — here it is.

Good Things

Today I had a good panel discussion about The Passion, with Rabbi Deborah Newman Kamin of Am Yisrael Synagogue and Pastor Robert Atkins of Trinity United Methodist Church at Trinity UMC in Wilmette; a good conversation about the Lukan Passion Narrative over at Christ Church, Winnetka.

So Duke lost; from everything I heart, it was a good game, and if Duke couldn’t put Maryland away with a five-point lead an under two minutes to play, then three cheers to Maryland for hanging tough and winning the hard way. Duke still got a #1 seed in the South Regional.

I had a good iSight-enabled iChat with Dave “Formerly ‘Time’s Shadow,’ now ‘Groundhog Day’ ” Rogers; he’s great fun to talk with (I wouldn’t mention to him, though, that occasionally his head goes a little blurry and his face turns all pixellated; he might be sensitive about that).

The best good thing of all, though, was seeing Josiah play Rev. Parris in The Crucible last night. I’m not a kind enough soul to cut amateur theater a lot of slack; I derive no great pleasure from seeing haphazard, awkward, sloppy theatrical productions, and “cuteness” or youth or being-related-to-one-of-the-actors does not alchemically change mediocre theater to wonderful, worthwhile theater. I’m a grouch on this subject, and I’m willing to admit it.

But last night’s production of The Crucible blew me away. Si and his colleagues did a terrific job on some complex and improbable material. It’s a shame they couldn’t extend the run, because more people ought to have had the opportunity to see them (and they ought to have had an even fuller benefit for all their hard work). I’m awfully proud of Si, and glad that he was surrounded by a tremendous ensemble.

Semi-Random Thoughts

— Everything signifies.

— Significance is not controllable.

— There’s no ethic intrinsic to signifying.

What am I getting at? Nothing original, but matters that I sometimes wish were more prominent in conversations and interactions around us, day by day. Chalk it up to too much thinking about theory lately.

So first of all, I’m proposing that signifying, meaning-making, semiosis, goes on all around, all the time. What you wear signifies, what you say signifies, how you walk signifies, where you live signifies — we’re saturated with signifying, and to keep our sanity we damp most of it down as “meaningless,” but that’s a gesture of force. Nothing is either quite meaningless or quite meaningful, but anything (word, gesture) may be found especially meaningful (or not), depending.

Second, not surprisingly, given what I just proposed, signifying always escapes our capacity to control. We often make to control signifying under the rule of intention (“I didn’t intend to offend you, so it’s not my responsibility if you’re hurt by what I did.”). The rule of intention has long been known to lead to Hell, though, and no other mode of policing signification has proved more effective. If I wear an orange jacket through the wrong neighborhood on St. Patrick’s Day, that’ll signify, whether I intend it to or not, and the significance may be enforced with sanctions that pay no respect to refined arguments about the nature of human intention, or the legitimacy of reader-oriented interpretation.

Hard as people try to build dikes on the river of meaning, to shore up those barriers with all sorts of reinforcement, still significance pours over the retaining walls and floods our homes and fields.

Third, if we can’t control it, and if it’s going on all the time all around us anyway, the notion that there might be an implied ethic to signification, such that if we only truly understood signification we would understand the right way to understand, runs into fatal incoherency. Is there an ethic of gravity? of air? of cosmic rays? There’s just no percentage in trying to draw out the hidden truth of signifying, in order to extract the Right Answer by which we can assess all efforts at signifying, or all inferred significations. We have no more control over signifying than we do over wildfires in the West, or the paths of hurricanes in the East. Signifying isn’t a force of nature; at the same time, it so outstrips our capacities to predict and control that we are not less helpless before the tides of signifying than we are helpless when an undertow draws us away from shore, tires us, and eventually pulls us under the water.

Watch Out World

As you may recall, Margaret and I are preparing ourselves for a commuter marriage for the next few years — I’m counting on this as an incentive for her to finish her PhD work promptly — and as Phase One of the preparations, we acquired an iSight camera with which we will eventually be able to look one another in the eyes with distance-impeded affection. As a test drive, I eyeChatted with Kevin, and everything worked all right (slightly laggy, but all right); as soon as we get Margaret set up, we’ll be working on our long-distance crooning. In the meantime, though, it’s utterly convenient to take still of pictures such as this, that Pippa sketched of me this afternoon:

Blogmail

Not as in “extortion,” but in the sense of “using your blog to send personal messages in public.”

Dear Dorothea,

No problem. I was working on the Greek, and I got about halfway (I ended up looking for the numeric character entities myself), and the term began ending, with my customary overload of assignments coming due. No need to renounce pay; anyone who publicly polemicizes against the disappearing “u” is OK with me.

And then, as part of an email exchange:

Dear David,

That part of The Passion where Gibson, not satisfied with the gospels’ account that the Temple curtain was torn in half, raises the stakes another order of magnitude by concocting an earthquake that destroys the Temple itself — there’s just a flat-out anti-Judaic gesture. Remember, too, that the scene of the destruction of the Temple is intercut with the scene of Satan being isolated in the arid desert [of Hell?], and it seems likely that Gibson prompts his viewers to think that the destruction of the Temple (perhaps compressed from Rome’s immolation the Temple at the end of the Judean War) serves as a punishment for Judaism. Throw in the omnipresence of the High Priest through the brutal scourging and crucifixion scenes, and Gibson is (in the words of the Apostle) without excuse.

I’ve been going on and on about complexity and ambiguity (as did Paul de Man), but I shouldn’t let that obscure what seems prominently true about The Passion Of The Christ — that Gibson has produced a film that, without any cinematic or historical or narrative or theological necessity, spotlights Judaic responsibility for brutal torture inflicted on Jesus, and suggests that Judaism has been punished for its treatment of Jesus.

Finally, to people in general: What was with that drop of water at the end of the movie? Mark thought it was a tear from heaven (argh! pretty schmaltzy — besides, St. Eric Clapton has written that there are no more tears in heaven), and I saw someone think it was a reference to baptism (seems strained to me). I just thought, “Hey, it’s been cloudy and windy for a while, that’s just one superdense raindrop.”

Son of Passion

When Prof. Margaret Mitchell distributed her take on The Passion of the Christ through the Martin Marty Center yesterday, I was relieved to observe that her perspective largely aligned with what I’d already written. It’s a relief when the eminent scholars swoop in to back you up. I’d quibble with some of the details of her review, and with the its unambiguously negative key, but I’m inclined to agree with the specifics she cites.

But her column reminds me that I haven’t said anything yet about another problem relative to The Passion: its theology of the atonement. Now, one of my favorite aspects of atonement theology is that the atonement has never been the subject of an ecumenical consensus. People advocate one or another theory loudly, they anathematize people who don’t agree with them, but there’s no creedal formula, no Chalcedonian definition of the atonement. In other words, although specific Christian groups may adhere exclusively to one or another version of the atonement, the ecumenical church has never adopted a single articulation of the doctrine.

Mel Gibson’s approach to the atonement — one which has met with great enthusiasm among evangelicals — seems to involve the premise that in order to redeem the sins of humanity, foul and bitter though they be, Jesus had to suffer the most intense possible physical agony.

That theology involves a variety of problems. At the trivial level, it simply invites comparison of agonies: “Well, you think that’s bad? I had a root canal from an amateur dentist who didn’t use enough anesthesia, and. . . .” and so on. More seriously, it suggests a mechanical connection between physical pain and spiritual purity that falls short of sound theological reasoning. Most gravely problematic of all, if Jesus was obliged to suffer what we’ll grant, for the purposes of argument, the world’s all-time most grievous suffering, who instituted that requirement? If we suggest that God’s judgment on sin can only be assuaged by perfect innocence undergoing unjust suffering (the suffering itself being the requisite element), we imply a God who’s subject to some extrinsic requirement (“God doesn’t like suffering, but golly, God had to subject Jesus to that last round of floggings or the really bad sinners wouldn’t have been redeemed.” Had to? Sez who?). That’s dangerous terrain. It’s especially dangerous when Gibson foregrounds that misery, that utter abjection, with an over-the-top amplification of Jesus’ physical suffering, portrayed with all the most dramatic special effects and makeup.

Here’s the catch: a middle-clas-ified Christianity sanitizes Jesus’ real suffering and grim death in a way that insulates such cultural Christianity from the real suffering and grim mortality that Jesus’ sisters and brothers endure all over the world. Gibson does well to confront his American audience with a shocking picture of what pious souls are talking about Sunday morning. But Gibson didn’t stop there, nor did he stop a little ways beyond there, or even a little further than that — opening a justifiable critique that The Passion of the Christ constitutes the ultimate exploitative horror movie. The Passion provides all the gore and torment that a depraved voyeur (or teenaged boy) might want, with the protective justification that it’s really about Jesus.

More Passion

I saw it on Boing Boing: Steve Martin’s script notes for The Passion.

Revelation

No, not that I understood anything in new and hitherto unanticipated ways today, but today was the last class of Epiphany Term for me, and I lectured on Revelation for the New Testament II class. I barely made it through; I was worn out and punchy, and the class was only marginally more composed (if that). I had been marking papers furiously, then found that the seminary courseware doesn't support essay questions as part of its quizzing module, so I had to develop a workaround in, oh, exactly no time.

So when you tell me that Tom has contributed again to our de Man discussion (and it feels good to be talking theory again with these friends), I have to ask for a day or two off on account of fried brain cells.

But I’m not so very fried that I didn’t notice this story (that Micah called to my attention). Perhaps the reporter conveyed a misleading impression of the Episcopal Church’s associate director for ecumenical and interfaith relations, but this story doesn’t depict the vision for technology and theology that I might have hoped for in a figure of such importance.

And I’ve continued to see a lot about The Passion, including two stories that depict responses from left and right that all sound shallow and off-track.

I’ll get to sleep and try to say something worthwhile tomorrow.

Sorry

A couple of posts ago, I characterized Paul de Man on the basis of imprecisely-remembered accounts, which I then put forward inaccurately. I above all ought to take pains not to make so heedless a gesture. I garbled details, and thereby made allegations I can’t back up. I’m sorry to Tom and to any to whom the memory of de Man is dear.

I was pointing toward a deep hurt, for which I held de Man responsible. The wound persists, whether it was de Man’s sword or another’s that caused it; indeed, the discursive point I was trying to make may paradoxically be strengthened by uncertainty over exactly who should pick up the tab for accountability. It’s that persistent ambiguity that inhabits whatever accusation we might make against de Man, or Mel Gibson — an ambiguity that does not let anyone off the hook (as trivializing dismissals of Derrida’s response to the de Man controversy would have it), but that indwells, besets, inhabits every account of human culpability — to which I meant to point. Another day, I might point to something in the New Testament about our efforts to ascertain by our own deliberative, spiritual strength and purity just what’s true and final, but today I’ll try to decide whether I was hoist by my own petard, or I inadvertently demonstrated the suggestion I was sketching.

None of this, of course, lets me off the hooks that connect me to Tom or to anybody else, for writing quickly, for expressing myself imprecisely; but it permits me an occasion to apologize, for which I give thanks: for the opportunity and for the learning it always brings.

PC or AD?

Joe, in the comments to Saturday’s post, observes, “Much of what I've read here and elsewhere complain that Gibson squarely places most of the blame on the Jews but nobody ever says how much, if any, responsiblity should be attributed to them. If I recall correctly, it's pretty much a biblical fact that the local Jewish populace played a signficiant role in dooming Jesus to his fate.”

Scholars disagree about the extent of Judean complicity with the crucifixion. Some pertinent facts include the following:

• Crucifixion was a Roman punishment; if Jesus was crucified, it was at the behest of Pontius Pilate (whatever his motivation).
• Contemporary sources characterize Pilate as a scornful, ruthless political manipulator — not a lonely, philosophical quester after truth, or a timorous puppet of the Temple hierarchy
• The Gospels have a demonstrable interest in distinguishing their leadership, their movement, from the leaders and movement that eventually became what we recognize as “Judaism.” That interest comes partly from the similarity of the two movements (especially to a Gentile observer — observers who didn’t adhere to either movement seem to have had a hard time telling them apart for centuries), partly from the discomfort of being associated with Judaism after the two Judean uprisings of the 60’s and 130’s, partly from in-group hostilities, and no doubt from other causes as well. But one is well-advised to read early accounts that identify Pharisees and the Temple authorities as part of a massive conspiracy against Jesus with attention to spin.

On the other hand, it seems peculiar to suppose that no one among Jesus’ rivals and adversaries was involved in the affairs that led to his crucifixion. I know of no plausible basis for disputing that the gospel claims that Jesus was handed over to Pilate by way of some aggrieved prominent Judean citizens; that account fits the general tenor of the times and of the behavior that Josephus, for instance, describes among the factions of citizens in first-century Jerusalem and Judea.

The point, in this context, is not that Gibson should have removed any suggestion that Judeans were involved, but that after millennia of persecutions (ostensibly grounded in the notion that Jews are “Christ-killers”), and especially after the Holocaust, it behooves Gentiles to be particularly careful about what they allege about Judaic involvement in the crucifixion. Gibson in some ways heightens the degree of involvement we can see in the gospel accounts.

The problem, then, isn’t that he includes Jews in the responsibility for the crucifixion, but that he extends and the emphasizes their involvement. (But now my faculty meeting is beginning, so I have to go.)

Saletanella Poisoning

Quoth William Saletan:

“One of the things that must never change is the entrepreneurial spirit of America,” Bush says at the outset of the ad. “This country needs a president who clearly sees that.” That’s Bush in a nutshell: He sees our “spirit” but not the lives, jobs, and health insurance we’ve lost. I’m sure he’d make a fine theologian.

“Hold me back,” as the song goes. I’d spell out my rebuttal of Saletan’s ignorant derogatory dismissal of my entire vocation, but simply quoting his words makes my point more eloquently.

Lectures and Discussions

Over at Invisible Adjunct, they’re talking about the relatives merits of lecture-based and discussion-based teaching. I want to join in, but I don’t have time right now because I have so many papers to mark. I’ll get to this discussion soon, and I haven’t forgotten Heath Row either (who could?), but right now the papers are judging me. . . .

Passion and Postmodernism

Q: What do these two topics have in common?

A: I started this morning’s Adult Ed class at Christ Church by describing the way Matthew’s Gospel presents the passion narrative. I cited a few distinctively Matthean passages: the parables of the Two Sons, of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, of the Sheep and Goats; the sum of 30 silver pieces for Jduas’s turning Jesus in, and of Judas’s subsequent suicide; the guards at the tomb; of course, the blood curse. I also cited the chapter-long denunciation of the Pharisees (Mark and Luke share some of this material, scattered through their narratives, but Matthew has more and concentrates it in a long, scorching monologue in the run-up to the hearings and crucifixion).

As I was saying this, it occurred to me that Gibson hadn’t included any of that material in The Passion. In fact, I couldn’t recall his depicting any of the numerous controversies with Judean leaders in the gospels (a couple appear as topics of conflict when Caiaphas and his colleagues charge Jesus, and then the High Priest refers to some of these by title when accusing Jesus before Pilate). On the whole (and as far as I recall), Gibson’s Jesus has nothing bad to say about Judaism as a way of life, or its leaders as teachers and spiritual guides. That’s remarkable, given the source material Gibson had to work with and the plot line he took up.

That, then, inspired me to think of The Passion a different way around. If Mel Gibson were a confirmed anti-Semite who wanted to make a film that would engender hatred of Jews around the world, how well would we say that he did? I cited a number of problems with the film yesterday, and I stand by those criticisms; at a number of turns, Gibson’s directorial vision (informed by his interest in the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich) shapes the visual and narrative force of the passion in ways that foreground Judaic responsibility for Christ’s suffering. That’s bad, and pernicious, and Gibson ought to have had the wisdom to temper his production so as to preserve its strengths while eschewing these unnecessary, inflammatory flourishes. I’m not as comfortable with the film as my estimable overseas colleague Mark Goodacre, who finds that the complaint of anti-Judaism “has been at best greatly overstated.” Mark’s a fine, subtle reader and an expert on Jesus films, but I part company with him here; I think that the scholarly response to The Passion has rightly found serious problems with the significance of the ways Gibson represents Jews and Judaism.

But — how many opportunities to scapegoat and slander Jewish leaders did Gibson bypass? The Gospels offer truckloads of anecdotes and incidents that he could have imported to the end of making Pharisees and priests look even worse, and he brought none of that material into the film. Although Caiaphas had bad teeth (I noticed that right away, in contrast to Jesus’ pearly white choppers) and Annas looked like a stereotyped Shylock, I didn’t perceive any of the physiognomic problems that Frank Rich saw (subscription link) in the whole ensemble of actors portraying Jews (he seems especially provoked by their noses: “The only Jew with a pretty nose in this Judea is Jesus,” he says, but I think Peter’s was kinda sweet, and the Marys had nice noses — but then, I’m not a nose man). In short, if Gibson wanted to make a propaganda piece directed against Jews, he produced a remarkably restrained provocation.

If we can see that Gibson didn’t produce nearly as horrific a depiction of Judaism and its leaders as he might readily have done, we may have a reason to attend to his defensive self-exculpatory polemics. His response to charges of the anti-Judaic tenor of The Passion have gone over the top (as seems characteristic of Gibson, of his most prominent film roles and of his directorial gestures), but his frenzy of self-justification may derive from a fervent conviction that he deliberately tried to make the movie without some obvious anti-Judaic elements that he saw and avoided. (He hasn’t said so, as far as I know, but that wouldn’t make nearly as good press copy as his death threats against Frank Rich and his dog).

OK, I’ve covered The Passion; what about postmodernism? One of my favorite works by Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend, describes a circumstance wherein two discourses of justice propose cases for divergent resolutions to a conflict — and there’s no way to judge between the two discourses without adopting premises that themselves determine the outcome of the judgment. (For a simplistic version of this phenomenon, imagine Ashcroft v. Eldred as “intellectual property rights” versus “right to an intellectual commons” where each side has a demonstrable historic and philosophical justification and there’s no ground on which to adjudicate the case without adopting the terminology and premises of one of the parties to the dispute). Gibson v. Fredriksen might exemplify such a differend. Gibson’s case articulates his intentional unwillingness to incorporate into the film such material as Jesus’ explicit denunciation of the Pharisees, his loutish, sadistic Roman torturers, his depiction of Pilate as a weak character, and his willingness to accommodate some of the advisory committee’s concerns. Fredriksen’s case would include the numerous instances in which Gibson ordained behavior that would plausibly encourage the beliefs of people predisposed to find Jews responsible for the crucifixion. Her side would note that Gibson resisted any modification of his original vision of the film and attacked his critics, which explains why they read his apologias for the work with appropriate hermeneutical skepticism.

Whose side would be right? On what basis would one formulate that judgment?

I remain persuaded that Gibson’s Passion warrants the criticisms that Fredriksen (and here Prof. Fredriksen functions as a metonym for her colleagues in careful, public criticism of the movie) advances — but on what basis should I expect that Gibson see his work from Fredriksen’s critical position more than Fredriksen sees it from his? I will continue to warn students and readers that The Passion perpetuates and (by its powerful manipulation of the film medium) even heightens misleading impressions about the Judeans and their leaders. I insist that it’s not right to minimize the dangerous undercurrents of the movie. Gibson has directed a commercial powerhouse whose effects risk inciting hate-filled viewers to actions that Gibson would no doubt repudiate and condemn.

Postmodernism, in other words, helps me to recognize that my unambiguous sense that something is wrong in Gibson’s production values doesn’t exhaust the set of true claims about The Passion, and one of those true claims may well be the claim that Gibson was deliberately trying to tone down the possibly anti-Judaic tone of his source materials. His “intention,” however, doesn’t insulate him from the criticism that his film nonetheless represents first-century Judaism in a hostile light. It’s more complicated than that.

Postmodern Paul de Man wrote some brilliant works on blindness and insight, on literary interpretation, on ambiguity and the resolution of ambiguity, on ways that social convention interposes itself between text and interpretation, between critic and reader, between reader and reader and critic and critic. He wrote some callow columns of Nazi propaganda, and he drove from his academic haven somebody whom I deeply admire (who is up to something promising and great, God bless him). I don’t know what he intended by any of that — but working out academic politics on the backs of students is wrong, and servile propagandizing for genocidal tyrants is wrong, and composing nuanced treatises on language, interpretation, literature, and subtlety is good. I don’t exculpate de Man for his contemptible acts, nor do I stop reading his work for the insight it teaches.

Getting back round to Gibson and The Passion, I can judge the man and the work only by deliberately distancing myself from the complexities that each exemplifies. This is why I’m not buying weither simple condemnations of the work’s anti-Judaism, or soothing exculpations of Gibson’s intent. But I may not simply refrain from judging, either; that would be unjust. From de Man and Lyotard and Foucault and Derrida, I learn that the differend of judgment indwells all efforts to escape judgment or subjectivity, that our inescapable partiality does not justify partisanship, that when Pilate asks “Quid veritas est?” we owe an answer, the truest answer we can give, insufficient and corrigible though it be before the highest, truest judge. Gibson’s Passion bears the taint of an insensitivity he evidently can’t see, quite possibly blinded by a sincere certainty that he outflanked his partiality. To paraphrase the words that Gibson’s publicity machine attributed to the Bishop of Rome, “It is as it is”; The Passion of the Christ demonstrates a scarifyingly vivid grasp of certain aspects of the gospel, a dangerous blindness to others, and a grievous lack of the humility by which those who profess allegiance to the Anointed One need to rely on one another to help us address the (cross)beams in our eyes before we set out to operate on others.

Uh-Oh!

I don’t know how this happened, but I missed the Duke - UNC game (somehow I got it into my head that the game wasn’t till tomorrow). Luckily, Duke managed to win without me. Doc and I will rest more happily tonight.

The Mystery of The Passion

Don’t accept any simplistic responses to this movie. Though there’s a sense in which there’s nothing whatsoever subtle about it, nonetheless subtleties abound; on topics as fraught as the suffering and execution of Jesus of Nazareth — especially when they’re taken up into a media-cultural phenomenon — you’ll benefit from seeking out as nuanced responses as you can find. I can’t make any promises, but here’s a best try. I’ve read a lot about the movie over the last six months or so, and I know where I can find more, but I’m not going to construct a linkfest right now; I want to record my impressions straight through, and make the connections later. I won’t make far-reaching claims for my originality; if I say something that someone else has already said (pretty likely, since so much has been written), I’ll allow in advance that I may have read and remembered what she or he wrote before me.

What was good about this movie? A lot, in a number of ways. I frequently found myself wishing Gibson had relaxed his egocentric isolation from scholarly advice. Even a conservative scholar, one who dissents from the recent emphasis on reading the New Testament in a context more open to the positive relation of the Gospels and Paul toward Judaism, could have helped Gibson out on some points. Heck, even someone with a decent sense of probability could have improved the picture at countless small points (why are the High Priest and his retinue all always dressed in their full uniform, from midnight Thursday straight through to noon Friday, and all without looking mussed?). But Gibson’s slips pale beside the gravity of his representation of a suffering without parallel. I’m not sure one could exceed Gibson in enacting a monument to shattering brutality directed against the innocent.

Most importantly, Gibson’s Passion removes the torture and execution of Jesus from the realm of abstraction, where it usually dwells for inhabitants of twenty-first century liberal democracies, where the premises of “freedom of religion” and “due process” have become so ingrained as to conceal the brutality that undergirds the order of the ancient (and, in some parts of the world at some times, modern) state. I hope it will be harder for viewers tritely to refer to one or another nuisance as “my cross to bear.” The Passion is about real suffering, not a thin theological veneer of suffering.

I found many aspects of the movie to convey well the scene of first-century life. I’m not an archaeologist, but Gibson avoided many of the most flagrant mistakes of mid-twentieth-century costume dramas (was the design of the table that Jesus supposedly made appropriate for the first century? I wouldn’t think so, since he hardly have been making a table-and-chairs set for dining). I was surprised by how much of the dialogue I understood. I’m weak on languages, especially Aramaic and Latin, but I think the actors must have been speaking slowly (as you’d expect) and pronouncing without the kinds of regional accent and rhythm that confuse auditors. At the same time, I expected not to understand any of the dialogue at all, so “more than nothing” still comes in light. The actors weren’t obviously out of touch with their lines, too. They probably weren’t well-coached enough to fend off criticism from fluent Aramaic- (and Latin-) speakers, but they did better than I’d have guessed beforehand. I was nettled by the switching back-and-forth between the languages; I had a hard time following the rationale of why Pilate would speak Aramaic one minute, Latin the next; maybe there was an underlying consistency, but it wasn’t obvious, and the unaccountable alternation distracted me. The device of recording the film in ancient languages seemed to work.

Many of the actors did well. I wasn’t particularly impressed by Jim Cazeviel (apart from his willingness to continue filming after having been struck by lightning twice); he wasn’t much of a preacher, nor did he convey much personality in the flashbacks to time spent with Mary and his friends. Mary (Maia Morgenstern) played her part very well, I thought, as did Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci) and Pontius Pilate (Hristo Shopov), and Abenader (Fabio Sartor), Pilate’s centurion-assistant. The Marys avoided scenery-chewing emotion, even when Gibson’s direction assigned them overdrawn scenes. Shopov played beautifully his part as the Pilate whom Gibson wrote; much as I dislike the historical Pilate, and much as I object to what Gibson did with him (on which more below), I found myself being impressed by Shopov’s Pilate. The Roman soldiers evidently play to Gibson’s instruction; apart from Sartor, they’re all sadistic louts with exaggerated facial expressions to match their exuberant cruelty. (They seem to have stepped straight off the set of a Mad Max or Lethal Weapon movie, and into Roman period costume. Gibson can’t seem to direct either a hero or a villain as a complex character; especially the minor characters overplay their narrative functions.)

The cinematography follows Gibson’ cues, amplifying the impact of Gibson’s plot. Si suggested that both the cinematography and makeup should put up a fair bid for Oscars next year, and I suspect he’s right. Those would be nice, safe categories within which the Academy could acknowledge the magnitude of Gibson’s accomplishment without endorsing the project itself.

On the other hand, the first thing to strike me about the film was its audience, the most racially-integrated audience that I’ve seen in Evanston (especially noteworthy, since the cast is so distinctly white- or light-skinned). That sets this movie apart in a variety of important ways. Much of the violence in this film will trigger cultural and racial cues; Jews will see the movie very differently from Christians, and I expect that African-Americans will see it differently from whites, and so on through a variety of varieties of cultural experience. That may work to the good, if the movie engenders an explicit discussions about the representations of violence and injustice — though defensiveness surfaces more commonly than dialogue in such circumstances.

I was watching out for the production’s alleged anti-Judaism, and it didn’t take very long to spot. Toni Bertorelli, the Italian actor who plays Annas, could have been selected for his resemblance to the Hostile, Hook-nosed Jew of bitter experience. Gibson’s decision to enlist increasingly large crowds of hostile inhabitants of Jerusalem likewise will convey clearly a sense that “the Jews” were responsible for Jesus’ death. A few lonely locals and disciples (all depicted as quite Jewish, to Gibson’s credit as far as that goes) support or defend Jesus, but the vast preponderance of the inhabitants of Jerusalem seem to have heard about and formed an active detestation of Jesus. Gibson dresses the High Priest and his colleagues in full regalia for everything from their midnight inquisition to their scrutiny of Jesus’ flogging to their attention to the crucifixion. He goes far beyond the gospels in depicting the Caiaphas (named “Caiphas” here, the Latin version of his name) and Annas and their retinue attending almost every gory moment of the passion. Apart from a moment when Mary cites the first of the Four Questions of the Haggadah, one wouldn’t know that the events took place at Passover; the execution of Jesus seems to be the main event in the city. No lambs are being sacrificed, no meals being prepared. Judaism serves only as a (negative) backdrop for Jesus’ suffering — and when Gibson exaggerates the extraordinary events at Jesus’ death by ruining the Temple (instead of simply tearing the veil), it takes no great stretch of the imagination to read the event as the destruction of Judaism.

Moreover, the notorious scene when a group of Judeans demand Jesus’ crucifixion persuaded me to see the matter in a way quite opposite to Gibson’s representation. Where Gibson packs a crowd into Pilate’s court, all demanding that the Roman crucify Jesus, all I could see was the staggering incoherence of a mob of oppressed people insisting that their oppressor’s agent exact imperial carnage on one of the people. Imagine a movie that shows a crowd of southern Blacks insisting that the local White sheriff lynch an accused troublemaker — then turn up the volume, repeat the chant several times, and play the scene through two distinct times. (That image also conveys how unlikely it would be that Pilate/the sheriff would pause to examine his conscience about the guilt or innocence of the accused.) I listened closely for the blood curse from Matthew’s Gospel*, and heard it in Aramaic (there was no subtitle for the line), but I found it less disturbing and provocative than the explicit, repeated, emphatic demand, “Crucify him!”

Although Gibson justifiably makes the beatings, flogging, and crucifixion a more gruesome affair than most modern sensibilities are willing to imagine, his villains seem unanimously to have become unhinged at the prospect of torturing this particular man. There’s nothing gratuitous about violence in ancient governance; it’s part and parcel of maintaining order. Still, the various guards, floggers, spectators, attendants, soldiers, and miscellaneous onlookers all spare no opportunity to strike, choke, trip, cut, abuse, spit on, and otherwise brutalize Jesus. One might say, “Well, Satan has possessed everyone to make this the worst torture-and-execution ever,” but if so, the movie needs to make that explicit. Instead, a viewer has hardly any alternative but to regard the people of Jerusalem and their Roman occupiers to have singled Jesus out as someone who had to be spend the grimmestpossible twelve hours in Jerusalem. And although Romans do an ample share of the abuse, the Judean populace incite, and participate in, most of the violence. Even when the torture has been limited by authority figures or would be counter-productive (when Jesus carries the cross on the way to Golgotha), soldiers and by-standers do not lighten their relentless assault on the helpless prisoner.

All of this undermines the power of Gibson’ presentation, to some extent; I couldn’t help noticing tht I’d have had a hard time dragging that cross (unhistorically, Jesus bears the entire cross, not just the beam of the cross) from the city to Golgotha on a good day. Jesus shouldn’t even have been able to walk to Golgotha in his medical condition. Even the temple guard (who would have ample reason to be cautious in their treatment of their captive) begin the ghastly fun by pummeling Jesus and dropping him off a bridge on their way from Gethsemane to the High Priest’s court.

Speaking of which, how did Peter survive that incident with Malchus’s ear? Why didn’t someone just kill him on the spot? Attacking the guard can’t have been something they tolerated lightly (and if they were hesitant about killing in self-defense, why were they so giddily violent toward their possibly-important, possibly-innocent prisoner?

Gibson’s depictions of Pilate and Herod bothered me a lot. He draws a Herod straight out of the Jesus Christ Superstar school of fatuous buffoonery. Gibson depicts Pilate as a disgusted imperial enforcer, but one with an active conscience. His Pilate pays attention to Jesus, mulls over his words, and only sends Jesus for crucifixion when the High Priest and his mob outmaneuver him (Pilate is “rattled by a rabble of rowdy rebels,” as the Pilate of Monty Python’s version might have said). The Pilate of history, on the other hand, was a callous, pragmatic despot. He wouldn’t have hesitated a minute before handing Jesus over for crucifixion; his administration crucified thousands of Jews. One more wouldn’t matter in the slightest.

Gibson finds Mary at every scene of significance, as a bystander or (often) arriving on the scene after Jesus has left, retracing his footsteps and feeling his presence. I’m a supporter of Mary; I delight in the way that medieval sources often treat Jesus’ life and ministry as a distracting side-effect of Mary’s Immaculate Conception and continuing intercession for us. The sight of Mary trying to mop up the puddles of blood after Jesus’ flogging suggested that she’d lost her senses, but in this she was simply fitting in with everyone else in Gibson’s Grand Guignol Gospel of grotesquerie.

When I pre-reviewed the movie, I cited the absence of the heart of the gospels from Gibson’s Passion. I was wrong, insofar as Gibson does introduce some very brief flashbacks to Jesus’ ministry, but I was right that one would never develop from those short scenes any sense of the Jesus of the Gospels. Jesus heals the Roman soldier’s ear, but we see no program of healing; Jesus utters pithy sayings, but we see no career of teaching in parables or of wisdom teaching; the Jesus who suffers through this Passion doesn’t offer us a sense of what the suffering is all about. The Gospels show little interest in abstract “sin,” and great interest in the shape of a life that follows Jesus. Gibson shows little interest in the contours of Christian living, and a genius’s obsessive fascination with Jesus’ remediation of “Sin.”

At the end of the film, I was shaken and drained. I earnestly hope I will never again see such harrowing scenes of brutality. My appreciation of the physicality of the crucifixion has increased tremendously. My anger at the way that Christians casually emphasize general Judaic responsibility for Jesus’ horrible death, while they trivialize or shrug off Rome’s blame, has grown also. My sense of the historic embroideries of the Passion tradition has modulated from detached curiosity to engaged fascination and repulsion. My faith, such as it is, was perhaps least affected by the experience; what I saw this afternoon involves my feelings more than my understanding of who God is.

But that points to one of the tremendous aspects of this film, its strength and its weakness: Gibson has wrought a cinematic artifice that almost entirely escapes his intentions. I said at the beginning that Gibson has achieved what may be an unsurpassable illustration of innocent suffering, but how many viewers will take up their crosses? How many others will look at Pilate’s lackeys and go and do likewise? Gibson has disclaimed responsibility for the harm this movie may cause to Jews, to relations between Jews and Christians, to the Christians whose self-hatred succumbs to a spirit of destruction and mortification, since he did not intend those effects. He did undeniably intend, however, to sow the wind that has stirred up more-than-merely-human forces already. Who will reap the whirlwind — and who will cash the checks that flow to Icon Productions?

* In Matthew’s Gospel, of course, the words “His blood be on us and on our children” function not as an invocation of eternal retribution, but (at worst) as a claim of responsibility by those present at the scene. Christians who have through centuries made of these words a “blood curse” themselves stand condemned for their hateful misprision of a cry that should have humbled and silenced their own Christian hatred. I’m reluctantly beginning to read those words differently still, in a more intra-Judaic, Passover context; but I’m not all the way convinced yet.

Veni Vidi Bloggavi

Si and I did indeed see The Passion today. I’ll blog later; he’s blogging now.

Inquire Within

First prize for timely forwarding goes to Chris Locke, who called my attention to the story in the San Jose Mercury News; then grad-school crony Phil Kenneson saw the MSNBC version; Seabury’s email central linked straight to the pertinent site. Halley’s on top of it; and probably other links that I haven’t caught yet. As, for instance, Euan’s.

At least if the Diocese of Oxford follows trackbacks, they’ll have their candidate. . . .

Where We Stand

Margaret’s been playing a lot of Burning Monkey Solitaire waiting for notification from the doctoral programs to which she applied — to the extent that she’s now number thirteen worldwide in Burning Monkey Yukon.

We’ve been through some ups and downs, and I’ve been stunned by some of what she’s experienced (in interaction with people who’ve known us for years!); no, I won’t name names online. A happy ending, however, is in sight. She won’t formally accept her offer of admission till we’ve seen all the details and made sure all the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed, but she has a new academic home for next fall, and I’m too proud to hold it in any longer.

Looking Forward

Josiah and I expect to catch the Passion tomorrow, at the early show. Will report later.

No Blog Tonight

Among marking the four stacks of papers on my desk, teaching my last class at Northwestern for the term (I’lll miss the NU students — they’re fun to work with), saying evening mass, and hand-holding with Margaret about her grad-school applications, I don’t have a blog for you tonight.

Oh, all right, I’ll just add that I rediscovered Sly and the Family Stone’s later work (There’s A Riot Goin’ On and Fresh), songs from my high school days. I had remembered to track down the (early) Greatest Hits album on CD when we modulated to digital usic, but I’d forgotten to look for TARGO (which we had on vinyl) and Fresh. Terrific stuff, sharp, funky, and very strong.

Trevor’s Newman

In Trevor’s sermon at chapel today he quoted the following paragraph from John Henry Newman’s last sermon as an Anglican (“The Parting of Friends”):

And, O my brethren, O kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should you know any one whose lot it has been, by writing or by word of mouth, in some degree to help you thus to act; if he has ever told you what you knew about yourselves, or what you did not know; has read to you your wants or feelings, and comforted you by the very reading; has made you feel that there was a higher life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that you see; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed; if what he has said or done has ever made you take interest in him, and feel well inclined towards him; remember such a one in time to come, though you hear him not, and pray for him, that in all things he may know God's will, and at all times he may be ready to fulfil it.

That’s lovely — I had to copy it in here.

Under Correcioun

I devoted most of the energy available for blogging today to a response to Invisible Adjunct, who takes me to task for what I said and implied in an earlier post. I must agree that I oughtn’t have said that IA claimed to be a “good (or “very good” or ‘excellent’) teacher[s] and scholar[s].” I was thinking of comments I’d read there, but the scope of my generalization included IA’s own writing, and I don’t ever recall seeing IA make such a claim.

The heart of my point, which I evidently didn’t communicate well, was that the proportion of people who protested that they’re good teachers and scholars seems higher than the proportion of job applicants whose qualifications I’ve been in a position to evaluate. So far as I know, every adjunct-blogger’s claim that she or he constitutes an exception to that generaliztion is true; I’m not arguing particulars. I just can’t entirely explain why the situation looks different when I’m leafing through application files. (One difference may well be the constitution of different academic fields.)

Other commenters in the thread correct my misprision of IA’s response, to the effect that the problem isn’t that valiant adjuncts are wronged by duffle-headed full-timers, but that there’s no specifiable distinction to be drawn. You can’t tell an adjunct from a full-timer without drawing on tautological evidence, and there’s no coherent account of why one applicant should count as full-time timber and another not.

This point too is well-taken, especially when one tries to account for differences in fortune between specific individuals or between adjuncts and full-timers in the aggregate. On the other hand, I’m uncertain about what would count as an acceptably rigorous criterion for differentiating applications satisfactorily. Academic positions involve a peculiar mix of qualifications, and the emphases within that mix vary from locale to locale. I heartily agree that there’s no demonstrable property that should enable an impartial observer to separate some herbivores from others — but that premise means not only that most adjuncts may well “deserve” full-time status, but also that there might be non-obvious reasons that some do not. The thrust of my earlier musings was that the testimonial tales of woe that I had recently read don’t fit my experience of evaluating applications.

It’s not a peculiarly academic problem; in many fields, people occupy and hold onto jobs that others would do better, would presumably “deserve” more. De jure tenure, however renders academic hiring that much more problematic an area in which to rectify deadwood problems. Much as I hate to concede hard-won benefits, I’ve been persuaded that tenure is no longer a benefit to the teaching profession as a whole — only to those who can lay claim to it. My father delayed his retirement for a long time, demanding that he be replaced by one full-time position rather than a shuttle of adjuncts, and part of my reluctance to give ground on the justification of tenure involved my sense of the rightness of his struggle to make sure that the benefits for which he’d worked hard weren’t dissipated in the name of lowering costs. I’m ready to change tack, though.

To close, then, I apologize to the exploited adjuncts whom I’ve mistakenly wronged; I repeat that I appreciate IA and the IA community for keeping my conscience awake to the extent of academia’s culpable complicity in the exploitation of part-time faculty. I don’t know which ones would make better full-time faculty than which present full-timers, but I know that more institutions should employ more full-time faculty, and those that rely on adjuncts should absolutely make their working conditions less Dickensian.

On The Passion, Before I See It

The pressure’s building for me togo see The Passion of the Christ; I really have to see it within the next two weeks, but at this point it’ll be a case to the sooner, the better. (It would be convenient if a cinematic obligation excused me from marking the four stacks of papers that are scheduled to come in this week, but alas! no such luck). Some friends have been goading me to see it soon, though; in #joiito the other night, we ended up in a re-titling slam that began with one participant connecting The Passion with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I noted that I was anticipating something like “St. John the Evangelist meets Quentin Tarantino”, so I proposed Kill Jesus. But Jeannie Cool topped all with her brilliant, Pulp Crucifixion.

Although I haven’t seen the film yet (it feels strange to be saying that, since as I write, The Passion opened less than a week ago), I’ve been keeping a fairly close eye on its progress through production. Reading Mark Goodacre’s blog certainly helps in that respect — since film and the New Testament is a special interest of his, this topic has occupied his attention since he started blogging six months ago. Without ever having seen a frame of the movie, I find myself well-able to bluff my way through a casual conversation about it.

Without the pretense of bluffing, though, and in response to numerous inquiries, I’ll begin my response to The Passion with some observations that don’t depend on having seen the picture.

First, regarding the controversy over the scholarly early-response team and the allegedly-stolen script: I know several of the scholars in question, and there’s simply no question in my mind of their participating in a group evaluation of the script if they didn’t understand the enterprise to have been entirely above-board. I’ve seen Paula Fredriksen’s version of the events several times, and it sounds quite plausible to me. Readers should bear in mind that some of the members of the small group number among the busiest biblical scholars around (eminent scholars with no need of publicity); just how credible is the notion that they’d have time to participate in a sub rosa plot to discredit Mel Gibson?

Moreover, Gibson and his allies have portrayed the group as a bunch of hypersensitive complainers. This, too, reflects poorly on Gibson’s side of the story. I know Amy Jill Levine well, and I am acquainted with Paula Fredriksen, and they’re two exceptionally level-headed New Testament scholars. Far from being querulous cavilers, they represent a reliably high standard of Jewish interpretation of early Christianity — critical, generous, sensible, and erudite. If Gibson and his entourage perpetuate the improbable yarn of a “stolen” script and the defensive charge that the joint Catholic-Jewish committee comprised professional whiners, then so much the worse for Gibson’s own reputation.

Second, Gibson has set himself a very peculiar challenge. Making a movie about the last twelve hours of Jesus’ life seems as counter intuitive as making a movie of just the fifth act of Hamlet, or of Abraham Lincoln’s trip to the theater; it’s all the degradation and misery without any of the contextual cues that might render the events comprehensible. It’s no wonder people feel deeply moved by this presentation — one would hope we’d feel sympathetic to an inoffensive civilian being dragged off the street, beaten to a bloody pulp, and executed in a uniquely agonizing way.

Now, the matter of context remains an interpretive choice — by opting out of a portrayal of Jesus’ teaching and healing ministry, by ignoring the closely-reasoned controversies with his theological rivals, Gibson chooses to represent Jesus as unaccountably persecuted; he contrasts obscene suffering with utter innocence. But that’s neither the gospels’ narrative version of Jesus’ life and significance nor even the passion narrative that, even in Mark, constitutes a heightened, concentrated narrative exposition of how Jesus ends up on the cross. Gibson chooses to film only the grimmest moments from a narrative that ranges from shared joys to confusion and dismay to transcendent ecstasy to brutal, dehumanizing torture. He has the artistic freedom and theological rationale for so choosing — but that’s a choice, not a simple restaging of historical events.

Third, why Latin? I know, everyone’s on him about this, but it’s worth underscoring. Virtually all of the communication among Romans and Israelites would have taken place in Greek, and who knows how much Galileans and Judeans used Greek in conversations among themselves? With Gibson’s decision deliberately to misrepresent the story by casting it in the language cherished by partisans of anti-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, he plays a card that weakens any claims he might make to an ideologically-innocent production.

Fourth — and here I switch from questioning Gibson to defending him slightly — if you’re going to make a movie from so short a segment of story, so under-narrated a textual artifact, then you’ll have to flesh out the film version with material that’s not in the text. So when people observe that Gibson has imported motifs, scenes, and characters from non-biblical sources, I say, “Well, of course he has.” It would take only a few minutes to film the last few hours of Jesus’ life as the gospels narrate them — he has to fill up the screen time with something.

But fifth, if he’s going to add material to his source narrative, why does he select the amplifications that he does? He can’t simply claim to be re-telling the gospels; he rejected that opportunity at the outset. He’s composing a macabre theological alternative to the gospels, grounded in a pastiche of ancient, medieval, and nineteenth-century theologies and visions. In Gibsonian theology, the two-word statement “they flogged him” (two words in Greek) becomes the centerpiece, so I am told, of his cinematic Christology.

That’s not idiosyncratic, but neither is it nonpartisan. And unfortunately for Gibson’s protestations, some of the partisans with whom his theology keeps company are — whatever his personal intentions — virulently anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic. Gibson himself may be as righteous a Gentile as ever walked the earth, his deliberate plans as irenic and compassionate as the eunuch who rescued Jeremiah from prison. He’s just chosen a singularly unpropitious staging ground from which to make that case.

A Toast!

Among events that one can reasonably expect to happen, few make me gladder than hearing that a friend’s discomfiture has come to an end — which is my elliptical way of proposing a toast to our witty, eloquent, lovely friend Michael O’Connor Clarke, who is now RE-installed (though as of this writing, his weblog doesn’t acknowledge it, only hints that it’s coming).

But spring is in the air, and good news is going around. Now, if we can only get regular paychecks for Chris and Jeneane and some other of our colleagues. We—re waiting for some good news of our own around here; let’s make this turn of the wheel go memetic, and get a critical mass of positive developments spinning off in all directions!

Pedagogy Complements Theology

”To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.” — Fernando Pessoa (writing as “Bernardo Soares”), according to Gary Lachman (via The Revealer). The whole Lachman article on Pessoa reads as though Chris Locke invented it.