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Once upon a time, in the days when they ran the Internet on an engine salvaged from a defunct 1967 VW Beetle, a number of us got into a running brouhaha about “authenticity.” I was an “authenticity skeptic,” reluctant to allow more than ideological content this usage. The topic comes up frequently enough that our debates never quite faded from memory, nor even from on-going currency among us discussants, and this morning I fell to thinking about what I might say to stand in for the abused term “authenticity.”

I wonder whether we might get any traction on the disagreement between me and the defenders of authenticity if we were to compare authenticity with sincerity (another term that’s suffered a lot of abuse). I’m willing enough to commend sincerity, in a way that I hesitate to buy into authenticity.

“Sincerity,” I think, invokes the correspondence of the outlook one expresses with one’s actual convictions and sentiments. If I were to say, “I’m terribly sorry that the Baltimore Orioles dominated baseball in the early 1970’s,” that apology would be insincere inasmuch as I’m a devoted (and nostalgic) Orioles fan. “Sincerity” involves one element of what most people seem to want “authenticity” to do, but it falls short; one can imagine a blues performer who sincerely performs “Hellhound on My Trail,” but who has never known poverty, bigotry, or profound romantic disappointment — as sincere as she might be, there’s a strong chance that her performance would lack something that many people would identify as “authenticity.”

Here, though, I respond: I agree that her performance misses the point, but do we advance our understanding of what’s wrong with this picture by saying that she’s “inauthentic”? Might we not more helpfully call her interpretation unconvincing, or shallow, or glib? My students often have to read Henry Louis Gates’s essay “ ‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree” (it would be great if I could link to the New York Times Book Review November 24, 1991 — but alas, that’s not possible), in which Gates clearly tracks numerous occasions when presumably “authentic” expressions were commended and acclaimed until their authors were revealed. The point of departure for Gates’s reflections is Asa Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, which many praised for its depiction of Native American wisdom, until they learned that it had been written by a white man (with a long history of racist writing and action).

When I fret about the value of “authenticity” in discourse, I’m more concerned about ways we can clarify the basis for our praise and derogation; I’m still not sure “authenticity” contributes much to that end.

When I hear about the importance of the church engaging popular culture more richly, I usually hear the subtext “and ditch all that out-moded, incomprehensible stuff that nobody who likes The Simpsons or listens to rock and roll or spends a lot of time online would ever believe. Sometimes they throw in the canard about “speaking in code,” as though any complex endeavor that has lived and developed for decades (much less centuries) doesn’t develop its own in-house terminology. Here’s a message, pop-cultured despisers: I like the Simpsons, I listen to rock and roll, and I spend more time online thasn all of you (as the Apostle would say). And I believe those things, and the church’s particular ways of expressing itself are not inconsequentially dispensable.

So I doubt that many people read the recent posts by Dylan Breuer and and Kathy Sierra and thought, “Hey, that’s the kind of thing AKMA would say about liturgy.” Well, it’s not, exactly. But though these are not the precise perspectives I would bring to bear on liturgical planning, I think that Dylan and Kathy are quite right in what they say on their respective topics, and their observations tend to confirm my very Anglo-Catholic perspective on liturgy. I’ll spell out a more detailed account of the convergence some other time — I’m drafting a series of posts on Enriching Our Worship, the Episcopal Church’s compilation of authorized liturgies, and I probably ought to articulate my liturgical theology in greater detail first — but for now, I want to offer an appreciative link along with a promissory note toward further comment.

I keep reminding myself that Reading Week is pretty soon, and the end of the term comes soon after that.

Just a word to say, I finished the paper, it went just fine, I need to burnish it a little bit, but Ill post it here soon. [Sound of his head falling onto the desktop.]

The friendly manager of CVS exchanged my dysfunctional beard trimmer for one that turns out to work just fine, and I am no longer threatening to be mistaken for a member of ZZ Top.

Pride In The Name Of Family

It’s all pretty much confirmed — Nate will graduate from Eastman School of Music in a couple of weeks, magna cum laude, and after finishing his thesis (on Steve Reich and minimalism) will move from Rochester to Ann Arbor, where he has accepted a Regents Fellowship to study music theory in the doctoral program at the University of Michigan. We’re monstrously proud of him, as of all our children, and thrilled that doing the things he loves is working out so well for him. <parents phosphoresce with delight>

The first electric beard trimmer that I remember buying came from a store in Northgate Mall in Durham; that one lasted through my doctoral program and my jobs in Florida and New Jersey, about twelve years. I had to buy a new one two or three years ago here in Evanston; that one quit about three weeks ago. I bought a replacement at the drugstore on Monday, and it never even started.

If I seem especially shaggy for the next interval, it’s because someone seems to be trying to tell me something.

Baker Academic’s summer catalog arrived today, with a full-page promotion of Reading Scripture With the Church, the title they’ve given to the published version of last spring’s Winslow Lectures at Seabury. They’ll make great trick-or-treat goodies, when they’re actually printed this fall, so be sure to get enough to go around.

I have neither the time nor the foolishness to devote a lot of time to responding to Scott Adams’ recent forays into the field of theory-of-religion; a comprehensively prudent blogger would just say, “Discuss among yourselves.”

Lacking that degree of prudence, I may simply observe that mockery doesn’t constitute the acid text of sound teaching; humor depends to a very great extent on the observer’s unquestioned premises. A clever humorist ought to be able to wangle some absurdity out of almost any worldview — provided it’s one that neither s/he nor their auditors take quite seriously. By the same token, the unwillingness to see this or that as funny doesn’t necessarily make an audience “humorless” or over-serious. We can devote serious attention to the claims that [other] religious stances entail, but japery won’t be our best guide to evaluating the characteristics that our inquiries bring to the surface. (One may plausibly doubt that there’s a shared array of criteria by which we could reach judgments more useful than “That’s close to what I already believe” — but that’s not the point just now.) I share some of Adams’s distaste for a “respect” that precludes critical analysis, but I doubt that he has demonstrated the keen insight into religious phenomena that would warrant our taking his proposals as a guide to what we might do by way of mutual criticism.

My confidence in Adams as a thoughtful interlocutor diminishes inasmuch as his comments on scholarly rock star Bart Ehrman’s latest book suggest that he’s not the most attentive reader on the block. While I have not read Ehrman’s book, I would be surprised if he ascribed the vast range of transcriptional errors we see in the manuscript history of the New Testament to “semi-literate opinionated morons” (Adams’s report on Ehrman). If Adams wants to know “what the real argument is” relative to doctrines of Scripture and textual transmission (and the relation of biblical texts to factual error), he might begin by reading contemporary sources more carefully.

I’m trying to map out my forty minutes for Saturday’s Chicago Society of Biblical Research meeting. I know I can fill the time; the key (as I learned last spring, in the difference between a presentation at Notre Dame and my Winslow Lecture) boils down to organization, as Seabury’s Writing Group veterans can testify.

Some points I want to make:

• Some perspective on controversies over “legitimacy” and “illegitimacy” in biblical interpretation, especially in light of Michael Fox’s recent essay on “faith-based scholarship”
• My [still-too-casual] angle on semiotics and interpretation
• How my angle affects the ways we think about theological interpretation
• Main point of talk: The same way of thinking about semiotics/interpretation that helps me make sense of “theological interpretation” also helps me understand and articulate the value of secular interpretation of the Bible. I’m at home in that discussion, not because I believe less what the church says of the Bible, but because I respect and know the rules of the signifying practice of technical biblical scholarship (and academic discourse in general). One doesn’t need a totalizing rationale for the nature of Truth and textuality to warrant secular biblical interpretation — one need only the rare virtue of good, close reading. One doesn’t need to assent to the latent premises of literary discourse in order to admire and to interpret them well; one need not unite oneself to a theological tradition in order to read that tradition’s texts well.
• Also helps explain our dowdy clothes (a professional colleague whom I shouldn’t quote without permission has referred to the Society of Biblical Literature as “the society of middle-aged white men who can’t dress themselves”) and unbearable ugliness of Volvos

That’s the basics of what I want to propose, perhaps even ending with the offensively utopian suggestion that we let go of feuding over whether biblical interpretation requires or proscribes theological commitment for its legitimacy. Rather than dressing up personal antipathies in disciplinary garb, we work toward enhancing the quality of one another’s readings on their own terms, and let God, or Time, or Nemesis, or who- or whatever adjudicate the legitimacy of our work.

Of course, I also have to write out all the stuff in between, and prepare for Wednesday’s and Friday’s classes. At least I’m not preaching in the next few days.

We knew Alex Golub way back when his prestige appointment was Professor of Melanesian Hermeneutics at the University of Blogaria, when he used to keep Seabury wired and was still working on his dissertation. Now, though, he’s stepped onto the larger stage of academic stardom not only with his participation in the hip anthropologists’ Savage Minds blog, but also from his featured appearance in Inside Higher Education. I don’t have his autograph, I don’t think, but I have a copy of his book and am reading his next one (and was a bit player in the prequel).

I am a man of frail, faint faith — ὀλιγόπιστος, oligopistos, as Jesus frequently calls his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel — and spending a Lent in reflection on death has not engendered an efflorescence of unwavering confidence in me. In hymn, Death no longer can appall, but once the hymn is over I’m as appalled as ever.

What I lack in faith, though, God provides in a generous abundance of the lives around me. Last night, Margaret and I felt the radiance of the reverent faith of the servers at St. Luke’s; they enacted the church’s believing through their unornamented observance of the ceremonies of the Easter Vigil. A moment-and-a-half’s reverent kneeling, a careful step, a creed in motion.

And several weeks ago, when Lent was new, Seabury gathered around the altar for a Friday midday mass, and someone had brought Elizabeth, a year-old child, along. Elizabeth was dressed in marvelous, brilliantly colorful clothing; and at the beginning of a season I had committed to spend in reflection on death, I was moved to tears by the glorious human gesture of dressing up our ephemeral, vulnerable mortality with all the bold grandeur that craft can muster. I will soon die, Elizabeth will soon die, but for these few days we can defy corruption with love, can defy gray ash with vibrant color, by God we can live!

My feeble faith doesn’t matter that much, in the end. A faith deeper and stronger, fuller and wiser, truer and more durable catches me up and bears me beyond the bounds of what my hobbled imagination can posit, to Truth that I cannot comprehend. Unlimited by the horizons of my judgment, faith surrounds and inhabits me, and John’s reverence, Elizabeth’s luminous attire, my weak faith, these provide a staging-ground for God’s invincible grace. Here I kneel; I can do no other.

I filed my taxes electronically this afternoon. Though I have lots to say about my paper for next Saturday and Easter and stuff, today I’m just purging the tax experience from my mind. Thanks for the helpful advice — we’ll definitely take it once the trauma has abated.

Meantime — beginning at sundown — Happy Easter!