Month: October 2005

I’ve been gestating, for a long time, a thorough, seething rant about the effects of cultural romanticism on Christian faith. I don’t have time to vent it all this evening — it involves the premise that faith and worship should make you feel good, the notion that everyone’s ideas about religion are equally sound, the arationality of religion, the premise that anything rebellious or heterodox is likely to be truer than anything settled or orthodox, to name but a few of these canards (the creed of the cult of the prophet St. Dan Brown) — but that jeremiad was on my mind as I prepared today’s sermon for the Feast of St Teresa of Avila (which I’ll post in the “extended” section).

I’ll rest with the note that romantic religion makes teaching practically impossible; romantically-conditioned audiences already know everything they need to, they are predisposed not simply to question but to disbelieve authority, and they may expect that anything that doesn’t warm their hearts doesn’t matter. Romanticist theological thought represents the triumph of self-justifying ignorance over diligence, reflection, and discernment.

(Good thing I’m not cutting loose with the real rant.)
Continue reading “Gefühls For Christ”

My referrers logs include the usual searches for “random thoughts,” “plural of impetus,” new contenders “wedding sermon” and “wedding blessing” (neither is in the top ten results, so some folks are searching pretty diligently), old favorite “forgiveness,” now “iPod Nano protective cover,” and — “Frank Paynter smoking” (no kidding). Frank, you should know someone’s checking up on you.

A relentless string of natural disasters is assailing humanity, of which the Katrina-Rita combination turns out to be the least catastrophic. Hurricane Stan in Mexico and Guatemala, the earthquake in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, oblige our sympathies, our help, every bit as much as when disaster strikes closer to home. I would be heartbroken if it turned out that we who called for aid from all around the world — and who accepted aid from regions now stricken with even greater miseries — were too preoccupied with local problems to hear the cries of our sisters and brothers who need us more desperately than ever.

It’s easy to make a contribution to Episcopal Relief and Development.

On a different topic — my Tutor’s link to me reminds me that I’ve been meaning to consult him about the promotional campaign for Forth & Towne a new Gap-owned chain of women’s clothing stores (remember when you went to the Gap to buy blue jeans, and pretty much only blue jeans?).

You won’t see this on the website (right now), but they mailed to prospective customers in Chicagoland a pink-and-grey PR brochure that includes the following frightening blandishments:

“It’s not just about the clothes. It’s about being inspired. It’s about being indulgent.”

“Develop a fetish for leisure time. . . .” “Show up with an entourage. . . .” “Commit random acts of indulgence. . . . It’s about treating yourself to an experience in shopping where you are the center of attention. Isn’t it about time?”

I have a hard time keeping track of the staff at Wealth Bondage (though if I recall correctly, Captain Blowtorch is always keeping track of me), but this operation would seem to pertain to several of the castmembers of that World. The unabashed stench of sweet self-obsession cries out for the kind of counteragent only the Tutor’s bitter medicine can deploy.

The Toronto Star (registration required, sorry) covers the triumphant wedding (two weeks ago) of Torontonian ex-bachelor Joey deVilla and new Canadian Wendy “The Redhead” Koslow. Mazel tov!

Every now and then, someone floats the notion that Western Christianity might better serve God and humanity by declaring a “free play” moment, where ecclesial boundaries were suspended and the contents of extant denominations were shaken up and reshuffled — such that the “liberal” and “conservative” poles of contemporary churches could regroup together into internally-coherent theological bodies. That notion, of course, fails to reckon with the complexities of terms such as “liberal” and “conservative,” nor with the particularities that constitute churches as distinct from one another; the fantasy of spontaneous realignment might resolve certain kinds of conflict, but it would result in new sets of unstable conflicts, so no one would be much better off (we just be at each other over different topics — refreshing in the short term, but not particularly edifying in the long term).

I mention this because one conclusion I draw from the likely futility of the realignment dream reminds me that whatever definitions and distinctions we invoke to identify our church as church (as something different from a synagogue or a mosque, a benevolent society or club), we probably have to factor in a certain proportion of people with whom we disagree. The difficult part about dealing with tensions about and within the church comes from dealing with the difference between “disagreements we absolutely can’t live with” and “disagreements we have to put up with, like it or not.” When sometimes we imagine a church without the neuralgic discords that give us such headaches (and that attenuate the vigor of our mission), do we successfully manage to imagine that purified church including some of the disciples who represent annoyingly different ways of living out the Gospel? For myself — and I admit to having a very limited imagination — the only way I can do it is by thinking of particular people with whom I actually disagree, who (as it turns out) are the kinds of people who might be excluded from and “purified” congregation I might dream of. Which is essentially the church as I now inhabit it, which is one reason I would hate to see that church fracture and splinter into temporarily-homogeneous ideological adversaries.

To be fair, I acknowledge that that other Calvin got some things right:

“Calvin’s preaching represented an intensive examination of the detail’s of God’s Word that few other expositors would equal, sucking the last drops of meaning from every last syllable and turn of phrase. . . . This could be liberating to an audience precisely because it was so demanding: Calvin and the preachers who followed him asked a lot of their audience and were thus taking them seriously, as adults in the faith. Reformed congregations were expected to absorb and understand complex and abstract material and therefore were encouraged to see the value of education.”
— Diarmaid MacCullough, The Reformation: A History, p. 247.

I mean you no disrespect, but my wife is in town for a few days — blogging takes a back seat to refreshing our acquaintance with one another.

Happy birthday, wood s lot!

My well-deserved reputation as a handyman puts me in a league with the very most hapless schlemiels who have ever picked up a hand tool (the Geneva Convention prohibits allowing me near power tools ever since my woodshop teacher Mr. Proviano contacted Interpol way back in the sixties). Sometimes, though, a project presents itself that’s so very easy that even I can handle it.

The other day I was cleaning out a desk drawer in my office — itself an odd enough occurrence — when I happened on one of those cheap plastic cases that frequently gets thrown in with an order of business cards.

Having been keeping myn ears open relative to the brouhaha over how easily iPod Nanos (“Nanoes”?) get scratched up, I instantly considered the possibility that I held in my hand the easy solution to that problem. Sure enough,

it looks like it would work. I worked the Nano into the case and eyeballed the location of the output port, so I could cut as small a hole as necessary (and I tried to keep my cut smooth, so that there wouldn’t be any corners susceptible to tearing). I had to add a little width to my first cut, but the second cut aligned nicely with the headphone port, and the extra width allowed room for the casing for the headphone connector).

It works like a charm, the headphone plug fits perfectly, and the plastic is thin enough that you can operate the controls through it (though it somewhat attenuates the hypersensitivity of the control wheel, so you can handle the Nano with the volume jumping).

And here’s the end with the headphone port — plenty of room.

For my next project, I’m thinking of making a snowflake from folded paper, or preparing a peanut butter sandwich.

Margaret “Hot Zone” Adam called my attention to this story from CNN about reasearchers who try to learn about the present impending bird flu pandemic by re-engineering the flu strain that killed millions in 1918, and asked, “Do you think the novel has a movie contract yet?”

With a headline such as “Researchers reconstruct 1918 virus” or a photo caption such as “Workers take a blood sample from a chicken at an Indonesian farm where 156 chickens died” — that alone is a movie-worth of plot premise. Margaret wonders whether it’s hard to find actor-chickens, but I suggested that Jeanne and Gail could supply the cast.

Pippa, then, would get to portray the little girl who becomes a tragic first victim — who has a chicken as a pet (she loves her aunts’ chickens)!

I feel sad just thinking about it; at least, I will till the first royalty check from Hollywood rolls in. Spielberg, you know where to find us.

In honor of Margaret and Chris (on whom I rely for advance warning of any conceivable catastrophe), I’m pointing to Rebecca Blood’s Flu Pandmeic Awareness Week post and an article in Foreign Affairs on “Preparing For the Next Pandemic” (via Frank and Liz).

Reading them makes my throat feel scratchy. Maybe it’s not my bad back — maybe those are muscle aches. And my head. . . .