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No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, nor have I been crushed by the tree limb that fell down across our street last night. At the end of an exhausting year, I gave myself a week off (not exactly a week off, since I had Seabury meetings every day this week, and two on some days — but more nearly “off” than the rest of the year had been). I’ll be getting back into action this week, gradually.

While I was gone, Jordon pushed back on the “church and popular culture” topic, in an entirely apposite way. I don’t assume we’ll agree about everything, but it’s just the kind of discussion I want to be part of.

David cites Jay citing Raymond Williams to the support his argument that the participatory-media transition accelerates the dissolution of “mass culture,” and that’s a good thing. I second the motion.

While I haven’t been blogging actively, I have been spending a non-trivial amount of time deleting comment spam, which now seems to be flowing in a constant, intense stream despite its total ineffectiveness at this address. I know, it doesn’t cost the accursed spammer anything to try; the whole cost is borne by the host, in bandwidth and time spent deleting. One of my jobs this summer will involve the back-up and upgrade process here. In the meantime, if I’ve deleted a comment you left, I apologize. When deleting hundreds of posts left in the name of a prescription drug, a mode of sexual activity currently under legislative review, empty flattery with links to gambling sites, and invitations to resorts, an innocuous comment from a non-commercial visitor can easily get swept up in the process.

I should also say that this week has been framed by our learning that Allen Strehlow died early last Sunday morning. As I write, we’re sitting at the café while Si and Pip rehearsse with the choir for this afternoon’s memorial service. I would say more about Allen, but trivialities are cheap, and I’m not sure I’m up to trying for profundity yet.

Binder on the counter of Peet’s: “Leader-Led Training.” Is that unusual? I guess so; I overheard someone ask, the other day, “Is it possible for the church to learn from learning and teaching experiences?”

Here are some of the points I expect to make in tonight’s (and Wednesday’s) presentations on The da Vinci Code:

To begin with the obvious: ”symbology”? At Harvard? (I mean, maybe out in Boulder they have a symbology professor, but not at an Ivy League institution.)

How does the movie define “identity”? Who are the characters, and what do they stand for? For instance: the movie shows us no Protestant, Orthodox, (or Anglican) believers; only Roman Catholics, and only Roman Catholics of an extreme sort. Only one Roman Catholic character seems to have a shred of conscience, and that after he has already defied church teaching (relative to the sanctity of the confessional) and has disrupted police procedure, supoposedly at the behest of the church. The movie suggests that our identity is bound up with heredity (in a nostalgic, romantic-noble way). Evidently the Merovingian dynasty was all about helping the poor and oppressed (poor and oppressed people who never appear in the movie). The movie (and book) presuppose “origins” and “original [things]” are somehow truer than their contemporary manifestations.

The church’s teachings run in a very different direction. Counterexamples to the contrary notwithstanding (and reality, unlike the movie, admits of counterexamples), the church has from the apostolic time acknowledged that no “blood line” ennobles anyone, but that we are all God’s children by adoption, that God is not partial to one person over another, and that in Christ all particularities are harmonized into a concordant equality.

Who are the intelligent characters (on the movie’s terms)? The ones who believe in a conspiracy theory grounded in dubious evidence and false claims.

How do we discover/encounter truth? In what do we have faith? (Documents hidden in a basement?) Thomas: people we trust. In the movie/book, Clio (the muse of History) is, in effect, the One God; it’s singular, it’s not perspectival, and we have access to the truth. As Margaret points out, the movie communicates its “truth” with the grainy documentary film-clip effect; since we see scenes from the lead characters’ (true) pasts in grainy flashbacks, the movie suggests that the scenes from Christianity’s past are true in the same way. The rhetorical style of the book and movie’s characters conveys the impression that Christianity must be either a plot or a laughable delusion.

What’s the basis for believing in things? The movie suggests that the publicly-available, historic church is fraud, whereas a secret, private, unknown conspiracy represents the truth.

What is a “document,” and how does it testify to truth? If you find a basement full of Top Secret documents, does that make them instantly reliable?

The problem of “liking” theological texts: “Liking” limits interpretation by suggesting that we may concentrate on texts we like, it excuses us from talking about texts we don’t like, and undercuts reasoning about what’s good, true, sound.

What does it mean to kneel at the remains of Mary Magdalene? How does Tom Hanks kneeling at the [supposed] memorial of Mary Magdalene differ from Christians making a pilgrimage to a tomb or memorial? What does any of that behavior mean, on the movie’s terms?

It’s all about genealogical family — but the focus of the family is on the individual. Jesus’ alleged blood line did not expand and extend, but it narrowed down to one person (the notion that Sophie is the only descendant never gets examined in the movie; somehow Tom Hanks just knows that she’s alone).

Stuff like this.

Graduation went well, I’m beat, sermon to work on for tomorrow. I’m hoping that Sunday will begin my decompression time.

We didn’ close out every single last one of the editor’s queries — we can do that tonight, probably, or tomorrow afternoon. I did finish the preface, which I’ll put in the extended section.
Continue reading “The End”

I’ve pasted the preface in its current condition into the extended portion of this entry. I wish I’d gotten to this point sooner, so that I could have improved it in conversation with the sophisticated and critical readers who bother to read this weblog, but such wit as I can marshal under the best of circumstances abandoned me over the last few stress-filled weeks. My publishers may indulge a few last-minute changes, if you spot errors or infelicities that can be remedied with relatively little bother — but for the most part, this is what we end up with, for better or worse.

Now, on to Saturday’s sermon and Sunday’s da Vinci Code presentation. I can tell you this much: I will be near-comatose through the all-day faculty meeting we have on Monday.

Anyway, this is where it’s at so far. I’ll keep updating the version in the “extended” entry till it’s finally done.
Continue reading “Where It’s At”

Margaret’s helping, but I’m not making enough progress; concerned note from editor today. My brain, however, is intractably stuck; I have no publishable ideas. Will advise when further along.

I should be scribbling away on my preface-essay (and Saturday’s sermon), so for now, I’ll offer mostly just these links:

Zoe Williams of the Guardian explains, “No, it’s not ironic.”

The falcons are back in Evanston.

Elvis Costello’s list of 500 essential albums — I’m chuffed to observe how consistently his taste matches mine, though I’m not patient and well-informed enough to know and appreciate the full jazz and “classical” repertoires he cites.

This will be handy for some people who use YouTube and Google Video, where I spent some time watching old-school music videos yesterday.

Oh, and we went to see that movie yesterday; it was better, we thought, than the book — though still intensely problematic in numerous ways.

The church gets lots of advice about what it ought to be like, how it ought to change. Sometimes this advice actually helps clarify a problem, or brings to light a problem where the church hadn’t perceived anything wrong. Much of the time, though, these suggestions come from who have problems of their own to work out, who project them onto the church and tell us how to make the world better by conforming to their expectations.

Somewhere between “helpful” and “neurotic” lies the terrain on which people (very often church people) insist that the church’s leadership should immerse itself more fully in popular culture. On this suggestion, I wish to register a forceful dissent.

I may be kvetching because I’ve become a cantankerous old codger (thereby attaining a lifetime ambition), but I pretend to myself that I have plausible reasons for objecting. For instance, I don’t believe in “popular culture,” at least not as a definable field from which the church is significantly absent. Popular culture manifestly includes both The da Vinci Code and Left Behind, Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart, The Simpsons and 50 Cent and Prairie Home Companion and Keith Urban. I have a hard time believing that the blanket term “popular culture” does much productive work in identifying all these, especially in conjunction with the notion that church people neglect all of them.

When I hear this suggestion, context often suggests two more precise implications for the proposal. The less laudable reduces to the complaint that “the church doesn’t pay enough attention to the kind of popular culture I like.” So a homilist may scold me for not being sufficiently in touch with popular culture because I don’t watch TV or attend many movies — although I listen to rock’n’roll constantly, and spend recreational hours playing online games.

The more responsible version of the complaint entails (though I’ve never not usually heard this point made explicitly) that the church’s engagement with popular culture rarely escapes a stupefying aye-or-nay binarism. For a while, I heard abundant sermons about The Lion King, none of which raised the theologically- and culturally-critical questions that the movie raised. Instead, as best I recall (and I did try to suppress these memories), they drew facile comparisons between the characters in the movie with characters in the gospels, and noted with facile satisfaction the similarity of the young lion’s spiritual journey to Jesus’ (or ours).

If the church were a more congenial ecology for learning and critical reflection, the “popular culture” topos might bring to the surface more interesting issues: what shall we say about earnest disciples of Jesus who enjoy listening to songs with persistently misogynistic themes, or how we should negotiate the complications of Christian involvement with technology. If you’re just going to bash or endorse an ill-defined glob of under-examined cultural phenomena, though, I’d rather turn my iPod on or go play Warcraft.

(Later: I edited my remarks above to reflect that fact that I have indeed encountered people who work critically at the convergence and divergence of the church with popular culture — I just wasn’t thinking of them as the focal subjects of my crankiness at the time. Mary and Dylan come to mind as people who don’t just trade in glib binary alternatives, and Mary nominates Kathy Tanner and I invoke the Archbishop of Canterbury. As I acknowledge in my comment below, I had in mind a string of tedious sermons and sententious columns, rather than the diligent analysis characteristic of scholars such as Mary. My bad.)

The ether has enveloped and consumed the post on which Steve proclaimed his antipathy to pants (the closest I can come to finding it is Krista’s post alluding to it and this post of Steve’s that evokes a conversation on the topic), but just as Steve regretfully marks the passing of summer by noting the first day of fall on which he’s compelled to wear trousers, so I (more congenially disposed toward long pants) mark the dawn of summer by announcing that today, for the first time, I’ve put on my comfortable cargo shorts.

Isn’t all change “exact change”? How would you get hold of an “approximately thirty cents” piece? And if someone handed you one, how would you make change? “Let’s see: roughly sixty-five cents minus thirty-four cents makes just about thirty-one cents. Sorry — I have a somewhere-around-seventy-nine cent piece, but all I have for small change is exact amounts.”

Brought to you by the “recently spent thirty hours driving, many of them on toll roads” department.