love and loose holdings

Ours is a complicated world.

There are Pentecostals and then there are Pentecostals. I have known what might be called earthy Pentecostals in my lifetime. In fact, my long time best friend and his father are of this sort – and they were not uncommon in the hollows of my youth. They might drink, smoke, and cuss, along with seeing demons under most rocks and speaking in tongues. There is the overboard spiritualization, but also a certain, unwavering tenderness. These might wear the garment of health and wealth, but they don’t really believe it, or they appropriate it through a sort of kenotic givenness to others – they pray for your health and wealth even as they are giving you the shirt off their backs. They know enough of mystery – they pray and believe that God gives and heals, but when He doesn’t they don’t ask questions, or, more importantly, they do not provide answers.

There is another “type” of Pentecostal – and these are the unearthy sort. For these, all things fall under the spiritualized economy of divine cause and effect – the universe is nothing but an assortment of answers. If you do not have, or you are not well, there is a reason. Inevitably these reasons are moral reasons, even when tied to the notion of faith. You are sick or in lack or under divine punishment of some sort because of a lack of this or that virtue. Obviously, this sort of theology is about as far from Orthodox Christianity as one can get. I have never in my life been able to relate to this sort of Pentecostal on a human level.

This year, through an odd set of circumstances, my family and I have had quite a bit of dealings with a particular Pentecostal of the unearthy variety. While I maintain friendships with a few earthy Pentecostals, it has been quite a few years since I interacted with an unearthy one. The recent experience has been most illuminating. It has helped me see how I have changed, theologically, in the years since I last encountered this sort of lived theology. It has helped me very much with regard to thinking about how and what I wish to parent my children, and present the Gospel to them.

Our unearthy Pentecostal is a moralist of the first order. If you err in this or that way, there will be a consequence. That seems fine at the surface, until it becomes more and more apparent that the unearthy Pentecostal loves the consequences meted out to those who err more than she loves those who err. Indeed, by all appearances, the rules are loved more than the God who gives them, or the persons who struggle to obey them. What is most important is that we submit to the divine order. That is what we know. That is what is real. With the language of “loving God” this person, so it seems, actually means “loving God’s simplistic cause and effect economy of punishment and reward.” The divine Person, for this Pentecostal, is not really a Person but rather an abstract mechanism of just order. The human person is simply an machine made to respond to that order – either through right action which results in health, wealth, and blessing, or wrong action which results in sickness (of various sorts), poverty (again of various sorts), and impending doom.

Whenever any discussion comes up that involves moral or spiritual complexity, a short, immediate answer is provided, such as “that’s what happens when people forget God,” or the like. If a person is found to be in error concerning any matter – dress, eating habits, overuse of over the counter medicines (instead of prayer with faith), attitudes, moral concepts, sexuality, theology (one must subscribe to a very narrow interpretation of some branch of Pentecostalism, or, suffer the inevitable consequences), marriage (any hint of egalitarian tendencies is a sign of befriending demons), politics (vote for born-again evangelicals only, somehow even if they are not in our branch of Pentecostalism and are therefore probably hell fodder, they are close enough to merit a divinely appointed place in the polis), education (people who go to colleges other than bible colleges are arrogant and have been brainwashed, public schools are always demonic, homeschooling is vital, but let’s not focus too much on the education, rather teach the kids how to work – little boys to be common tradesmen, little girls to be submissive housewives who are not to manifest intellectual gifts in any fashion), etc., etc., etc.

The above is a rather extreme example of American religious moralism, but it is not an uncommon one, and this sort of moralism can be found across the religious spectrum – both conservatives and liberals from all sorts of confessions. One can trade the key moral issues, but still arrive at an economy of grace or “grace” that is no more than cause and effect rote determinism.

Thinking of these deterministic moralisms has reminded me, of late, of a friend of mine from past years, Ken. Ken had been for many years a sociology professor at the relatively conservative Evangelical Baptist college in Minnesota. But for the most part I came to know him after that. In one of his classes on a given day, he was asked by one of his students what he thought of the morality of homosexual unions. As it turned out, Ken had been thinking about this issue for several years. He told the questioner that in his reading of the NT, and given his own theological commitments (his theological method, in other words), he could no longer construe what he felt was an honest argument against a monogamous, committed, lifelong relationship between two persons of the same sex. Ken thus answered this one question on this one day, and never taught anything with regard to it in his classes, as his classes did not involve this subject matter at all.

As it turned out, one of the students in the class that day attended the church of a well known Baptist pastor in Minneapolis, one who had written a book on “Christian Hedonism” (he is in support of such a notion), if that rings any bells. Let’s call the pastor Rev. John. Rev. John is a conservative in this Baptist association, and he was and is a self-appointed watchdog of said Baptist college, which he felt was straying too much toward godless liberalism. The student here happened to be riding in a car the very day of the classroom question incident, and he told Rev. John about it.

This caused a quick and fierce circle of events to take place. Though the student who told Rev. John about Ken’s answer was friends with Ken and wished him no ill, Rev. John went about his business as zealot. Ken was a tenured professor who had taught for years. But he was required to go before some faculty commission and give his views on homosexuality. He did so. The commission pointed out that Ken signed a statement of adherence to the doctrinal commitments of the college. Ken pointed out that the statement mentioned nothing of homosexuality (it does now), that he was committed to said doctrines, and that he felt his relatively new and tentative views on homosexuality were not in necessary contradiction of said doctrines. Ken also pointed out that in many years of teaching this instance was the first and only time he had been asked such a question on the matter, and that he did not teach anything regarding the morality of homosexuality in any of his classes, so he did not understand how his opinion on the matter was relevant to his position as a sociology professor.

To make a long story less long, Ken was forced from his position, a settlement was reached, and Ken left academia after the whole affair was over. He then went on to become a bus driver for the City of St. Paul, which is what he did for most of the time I knew him.

I would meet with Ken once every week or two, and we would read a book together, something social science oriented, and discuss it over tea. I found Ken to be a gentleman in the fullest sense of the word: humble, considerate, modest, careful, concerned, warmly and sincerely polite, disarming, and constantly kind. I know many persons who have known Ken, and all of them admire him. Only an ideologue of strict observance could dislike Ken. When I would come back from my meetings with Ken, my wife would comment that she liked how my meeting with him affected my own spirit. He had a distinct gentleness that seemed to naturally encourage a gentleness in those who came into contact with him.


With regard to his intellect, Ken was one of the most honest interlocutors I have ever had. With regard to homosexuality in particular, his thoughts on the matter seemed to me to be the least affected by popular ideology of any person I have ever engaged who held or considered holding the positions which Ken was attempting to work through. And on one very important point I happened to agree with Ken: given the theological method which Ken and his former college inherited, the arguments for opposing homosexual “marriage” were awkwardly constructed at best, and oftentimes completely incoherent. Ken was ostracized for his positions (actually they were not firm positions but more a series of complicated questions, and an admission that he could not hold to a certain moral point in the manner others did), and he would very much be considered “the enemy” by a host of “conservative” or “traditional” Christians today.

I have long wondered about this. I have plenty of Evangelical and conservative magisterial Protestant friends, and plenty of Orthodox friends, who use the pill. Some of these do so even after possessing knowledge of its abortificient qualities. Why are these folks allowed to the table of “conservative Christianity” or “mere Christianity” but those with views such as Ken’s not allowed? The question could also be put to me. I believe that a Christian can divorce, remarry, and still rightly receive Eucharist, in keeping with Orthodox canons. For some traditional Anglicans, many conservative and traditional Catholics, and a number of Protestants (think of the Anabaptists, for instance) this belief ought to exclude me from the merely Christian or the traditionally Christian circles. Such questioning on my part led me to the conclusion that there is no such thing as mere Christianity and that the oft used category of “conservative Christianity” is incoherent and not worth using, indeed, even harmful.


Longtime readers of this blog know my thoughts on pansexualism and the disordered regard of sexuality in our age. I disagree with the advance of “homosexual marriage” in its various manifestations, and I disagree with the advance of a cultural acceptance of homosexuality as a good for individuals, for society, and for culture. I surely and completely disagree with theological justifications for homosexual union, at least all of them I have thus far encountered, and I see no way in which homosex can ever be blessed by an Orthodox theology or praxis. Whether or not or to what degree someone defends homosex via ideology does not matter with regard to the question of whether or not that person is correct in his or her beliefs regarding homosex. I believe that Ken, on this issue, is wrong.


In spite of being wrong, or at least not in assent with the truth, concerning a serious moral issue, it seems that God has continued to bless Ken with a fair measure of, well, I cannot think of a better term, holiness. Indeed, he is a far holier man than I, as any person who knows us both would have to attest, were he to be honest.

I do not mean to suggest any antinomianism here. A priest or bishop who teaches that the Church should bless homosexual unions should be removed from ministry, in as loving and quiet a manner as possible. A layperson who asserts such should be gently corrected by a priest or bishop. What I am grasping for here is this: a person can be wrong about this or that and still be a person who loves God, and God, as He pleases, may bless such a person in a manner that is not easily predicted upon the lines of a given determinism. It seems that humble people who sincerely seek God will be blessed in spite of a whole host of erring ephemera. At the Cross, all tit for tat economies of grace are obliterated. There is no “well, that’s what you get when you forget God” because God’s giving of Himself is relentless and any expression of kenotic form in a human life is ripe for the reception of grace, whatever the other ephemeral conditions. And, of course, the Giver of Grace goes where He wills and as He pleases, completely unsubject to our terms and strategies.

It seems that we should be very careful in our determinations concerning where God isn’t. This is not to say that we cannot express what the Church teaches regarding what is right and what is wrong, but rather that we must not forget that the Church teaches a love that stands before and after moral formulae, and that God gives Himself in spite of deviation from the moral formula, so it cannot be relied upon to make totalizing final determinations about the nature of persons. It would seem that an Orthodox anthropology sees only one human activity, one human path, which has ever achieved a total finality – and that is the saving activity of the God-Man Jesus Christ hung dead on a Tree. No other human activity, or condition, or state is final, and even the Cross is not final by necessity, it is the finality achieved through free volition, as the infinite God-Man freely gives Himself infinitely to those He loves.

As I write this I remember bits of advice Ken gave me years ago – hold on to ideas loosely, because they are all tentative; the most loving embrace is expressed with a soft touch, firm grasping is a sign of fear, which has nothing to do with love; we all stumble to our “positions” whether we present ourselves as stumblers or not. In hindsight, it is clear to me now that Ken saw the world through the lens of forgiveness, his own need for it, and his ready willingness to grant it to all.

It has taken me too many years to begin to learn this – that the opposite of ideology is not freedom, at least not as freedom is conceived in any of its modern conceptions. The opposite of ideology is mercy.

more of Rus...

This post contains crass generalizations. Have your grain of salt at the ready.

We sometimes here speak of little russia and great russia or little rus and great rus. These terms get applied in a sweeping manner. For instance, one will hear that the OCA is little russia and ROCOR is great Russia. There is some truth to such a statement, but there are and have for so long been so many anomalies to this paradigm that one wonders if the paradigm was ever settled. Perhaps it is rather without dispute that when striving toward the ethos of these terms St. Nil Sorsky represents little russia and his opponent St. Joseph Volotsky represents great russia.

But from there things get more complicated. There are saints which would seem overtly to be one or the other, say a great russian reading of St. Alexander Nevsky, or a little russian reading of St. Seraphim or Sarov, but with both of these counter readings are easy, there is some apparent little russian in St. Alexander and some great russian in St. Seraphim. Consider Dostoevsky, a Russophile with typical Russophile prejudices, but whose literary embodiments of the ethos of Holy Rus, as he saw it, Zossima and Alyosha, are through and through little russia.

I have written before of my love for St. Nil. One of the things I appreciate about his "little russian" spirituality is that it brings the spirituality and flavor of Athos and something of the breadth of Orthodox monasticism to Russia. Ironically, one might almost see St. Nil and his followers as more cosmopolitan and catholic than their counterparts. But that is a biased and prejudicial thing to say, is it not?

But the Church has recognized both St. Nil and St. Joseph as saints, and in doing so, seems to have witnessed that within both the little russian way and the great russian way there is the possibility of sanctity.

These two ways seem to be in tension, usually, and I think that they usually are. But we must be careful not to see them as in a state of dialectic tension. There is no synthesis to be found with little and great russias, though this is an agenda many have had in the past and continue to have today. There is no necessary relationship between little and great russia. Furthermore, the terms little russia and great russia do not provide a comprehensive categorization of Rus; all of Russian experience is not summed up in the recognition of little russia and great russia. Still, the tension and distinction assumed in the terms has been there, and probably is still there. I see this tension more in terms of the way political/cultural tensions are sometimes described by Eric Voegelin in Order and History. The tension is present, but we don't really know what to do with it. Indeed, it is probably best that we do not attempt to do anything with it, as this could cause more harm than good. In the past little russia and great russia have balanced out each other at times, but during other times they have not, and one might look back at certain times in Russian history and wish that it had been one sided in the opposite direction.

One thing that does occur to me in this regard, however, is that there seems to be an innate Russian characteristic to move toward the opposite ethos from the one that outsiders attempt to encourage or manipulate. If the West pushes for a little russia, Russians tend to move towards a great russia. On those occasions when the West has needed or wanted a great russia, Russians tend to move toward a little russia. Indeed, when one hears John McCain say that he thinks Russia should be removed from the G8 (and in the same breath he praises China - why?), one wonders if he has any familiarity with Russian history at all, as such rhetoric almost always accomplishes the precise opposite of its apparent intention. Or, perhaps, McCain wants a great russian Russia.

Many Orthodox in America are concerned about the great russian showiness of Russia (at least as presented in the media) of late, but this is often expressed by contrasting great russia with American political ideals (which will never be integrated into the Russian political vocabulary, except as an occasional farce), or, they long for a resurgence of little russia. In my opinion, from what I have read coming from Russia in the last few years, both little russia and great russia are thriving, culturally speaking, at the moment. How the tension plays out in the next decade remains to be seen. But we might be careful to view, say, the current MP as too great russian, for there are many little russian things going on within the MP at the moment. We westerners want these tensions to be or to become dialectic. We want them resolved in a manner that suits us. The Russian persona is much more comfortable with living with the tension in a manner that seeks no resolution. Little russia and great russia are simply both present as incomplete aspects of Russian existence. But we should be very careful, especially as outsiders, not to push for one over the other. As the Church has de facto taught, Russia can be saved in both "contexts." When we interfere, we are essentially saying, there is no hope (no salvation) in this way, you should go the other. The Russian, whose body and soul has inherited the grace of both little and great russias, naturally responds with, "I will show you different."

My home computer was on the fritz these past two weeks, and has now collapsed into a state of constant malfunction. It is being taken to the entry level technocrats for them to play with in the hopes of some sort of re-engineering, I can’t really say what, as my wife handles these matters.

In any event, If you have sent me an email in the past couple of weeks, you may want to send it again, because I am not sure that I got it the first time, and if I did get it, I am pretty certain it is now lost forever.

Thank you for your patience.

for the reluctant slavophile....

If one wants to put into perspective the scope of the EP’s influence, consider the recent story from Catholic Online concerning +Bartholomew’s recent address on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the Pontifical Oriental Institute. The EP, along with the highly influential Metropolitan John Zizioulas, came out swinging against the Russian Orthodox Church which, in their opinion, “finds itself unable to face the modern world.” Traditionalism, insularity, and conservatism are to blame for this apparently. Never mind, of course, that the Russian Church is the only jurisdiction who has put forth an in-depth, convincing, account of the relationship of the Church to modern society and what while the Greeks are busy decrying the Russians for their “conservatism,” abortion rates in Greece are amongst the highest in Europe. More importantly, when it comes to the actual numbers of faithful worldwide, the Russian Church, headed by Patriarch Alexii II, clearly outpaces all of the extant Patriarchates and autonomous jurisdictions. Yet, not surprisingly, it tends to be to the “non-Russians” where many Orthodox turn to get their marching orders; increased distancing from “Russian-ness” being the order of contemporary Orthodoxy. Who then, I wonder, is being insular? To believe a certain line—a line not unheard of from even certain conservative American Orthodox prelates—the Russian Church is backward looking, stodgy, and intoxicated with trappings and language. It is, rather, those willing to face the modern world, those who believe in an evangelistic mission, and are moved by the spirit (which spirit?) who ought to be followed. Not all of these sorts are “liberals” in the typical sense, but there is something telling that in order for them to hold to some of their positions and do so in a way which still maintains their own traditionalism, the “other side,” that typically “Slavic side,” must be castigated as reactionary.

I must confess that I have a hard time buying it. For all of my suspicions about “Slavophilism” amongst some converts and a great dislike of “pan-Slavism” replacing an authentic Orthodox witness, there may be something to the fact that the Russian Church, even in the midst of splintering and dissent through the twentieth century, has continued to bear much fruit. The old wounds are healing. I remember people remarking last year how astounding it was to attend a conference sponsored by ROCOR commemorating St. John Chrysostom and to see priests from the Moscow Patriarchate, ROCOR, the OCA, and other jurisdictions coming together. Maybe more shocking than this even is the fact that OCA priests, including Fr. John Behr, Dean of St. Vladimir’s (a “hotbed of modernism” in the eyes of many deriders), recently concelebrated the Divine Liturgy according to the Old Rite at the Old Believer Church of the Nativity during a week-long conference dedicated to the Orthodox family and the contemporary world. That very act itself would have been not simply unthinkable five years ago, it would have appeared to almost everyone to be a fundamental impossibility only two decades earlier. The movement towards greater unity and the removal of divisions within the Russian Church and its offshoots is a reality which, it seems, many Orthodox worldwide simply do not want to acknowledge. Too often they appear to want ecumenism without conscience and evangelism without due order; all perceived as standing in the way are in some sense either deficiently Orthodox or hopelessly lost (or both!). If raw numbers still meant something, if scope and breadth were the outcome of effort and zeal rather than computers and printing presses, things may be much different. But I suspect, in the end, no amount of whining will succeed in permanently obscuring reality.

-- from another brilliant post by Gabriel here, with more on Fr. John McGuckin’s expensive book, and a dissection of common inter-Orthodox prejudices.

The Metropolitan of Pergamon Ioannis Zizioulas is recently quoted as stating that "In the Eastern Church, especially in the Russian Church, there is a degree of insularity that leads to conservatism. There is an inability to face the challenges of the modern world, with tradition as an excuse," and "the true value of tradition is only reached when we can reshape our tradition. Tradition as the Christian Church's message does not mean doing nothing; instead it contains truth's momentum and does not fear the challenge of the contemporary world."

I made some comments regarding +IOANNIS' statements at a thread on Catholic-Orthodox ecumenism in light of the statements. But I rather liked better some comments made by a fellow named Phil:

When one complains about an “inability to face the challenges of the modern world,” you should be very suspicious that the speaker means, “yield to the modern world.” And how does one face the challenge of abortion or deconstructing marriage? [I think Phil mentions abortion and marriage in light of this, which I bring up in the thread.] What engagement other than “no” is appropriate? In fact, the experience of other Christian communities shows that any more engagement than this leads, inevitably, to the glorification of the modern world, not its correction.

The game is really given away, for me, by Metropolitan Ioannis’ own words: “There is an inability to face the challenges of the modern world, with tradition as an excuse.” (emphasis mine) Now, I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean: if the Tradition says abortion (for example) is wrong, how does that create an “excuse” for not facing the challenge of the modern world? It seems modernism demands abortion be celebrated, but Tradition provides no excuse for the Church to fail to disagree... The only way I can read Ioannis, tainted as I am as an ex-Anglican, is that Tradition is acting as a stubborn excuse to not yield to the world. If that’s what insularity is, let’s have more of it.

Indeed. There is such a thing as reactionary "conservative" ideology in modernity - that has become one of the hallmarks of modernity. But that does not at all seem to the case with regard to the recent statements from the MP. These statements are simply clear, broad, straightforward restatements of Orthodox belief and practice.

As I suggest in my comments on the thread, sometimes I think that with Zizioulas if Heidegger and Levinas or some equivalent modern "authority" has not been brought in via methodological infatuation, then real "engagement" has not happened. So on the one hand we have Zizioulas who makes much use of Levinas. On the other hand we have David B. Hart who writes in a rather compelling manner why it is that Levinas is, well, to put it more bluntly than he did, an intellectual farce. On a third hand you have Fr. John Behr who wrote a dissertation on Levinas but who, so far as I can tell, makes little use of him in his work (perhaps I am wrong). And sure and steady you have the MP who could probably give a rat's petunia regarding Levinas but states Orthodox faith and practice in a manner that virtually all adult Westerners can understand if they bothered to listen, and in a manner that is in keeping with what most Orthodox have believed regarding their belief and practice.

And, lastly, one might also point out the cuteness here. We have learned this lesson from ECUSA and that sort over and over again. Leader of a very small and not in the slightest bit influential ecclesial body is horrified that other Christian leaders are not "facing the challenges of the modern world." Let us entertain reality for a moment. Nobody in Europe is listening seriously to the rhetoric of ECUSA, or Rowan Williams, or the Lutheran Church in Norway, or the EP. They see some snippets from the EP about the environment in a magazine. In response, they think or intuit (very briefly) "he is saying what we are supposed to be saying, and he wears a very cool outfit, and looks both stern and happy at the same time, and that's all good because those folks in Eastern Europe who might still believe in that stuff will be more inclined to recycle, and, oh, there's a lingerie ad on the next page...." Don't get me wrong, I don't think the MP has any more direct influence in the West than the EP, but to hear the EP chastise the MP with regard to "facing the challenges" is rich. Look at those Christian communities that have "faced the challenges of the modern world." Notice their outstanding achievements.

defeated

Defeated is every hymn that striveth to pay homage to the multitude of Thy many compassions; for even should we offer Thee, O holy King, odes of praise numberless as the sands, we should still have done nothing worthy of what Thou has given unto us who cry to Thee: Alleluia.

- from the Akathist Hymn to the Most Holy Theotokos, HTM edition.

food and peace

...As well as nursing and feeding these passions, gluttony also destroys everything good. Once it gains the upper hand, it drives out self-control, moderation, courage, fortitude, and all other virtues. This is what Jeremiah cryptically indicates when he says 'And the chief cook of the Babylonians pulled down the wall of Jerusalem round about' (cf. 2 Kngs. 25:9-10; Jer.52:14. LXX). Here the 'chief cook' signifies the passion of gluttony for a chef makes every effort to minister to the belly, devising innumerable ways of giving it pleasure, and gluttony does just the same. A great variety of different foods overthrows the fortress of the virtues and razes it to the ground. Sauces and condiments are the siege-engines that batter against virtue and overthrow it, even when it is already firmly established. And while over-indulgence destroys the virtues, frugality destroys the stronghold of vice. Just as the chief cook of the Babylonians pulled down the walls of Jerusalem (and Jerusalem means a soul that is at peace) by encouraging fleshly pleasures through the art of cooking, so in the dream the Israelite's cake of barley bread, rolling down the hill, knocked down the Midianite tent (cf. Judg. 7:13); for a frugal diet, steadily maintained - gathering impetus, as it were, from year to year - destroys the impulse to unchastity. The Midianites symbolize the passions of unchastity, because it was they who introduced this vice into Israel and deceived a great number of the young people (cf. Num. 31:9). Scripture aptly says that the Midianites had tents while Jerusalem had a wall ; for all the things that contain virtue are wellfounded and firm, whereas those that contain vice are an external appearance - a tent - and are no different from fantasy.

In order to escape such vice, the saints fled from the towns and avoided meeting a large number of people, for they knew that the company of corrupt men is more destructive than a plague. This is why, indifferent to gain, they let their estates become sheep-pastures, so as to avoid distractions. This is why Elijah left Judaea and went to live on Mount Carmel (cf. 1 Kgs. 18:19), which was desolate and full of wild animals ; and apart from what grew on tress and shrubs there was nothing to eat, so he kept himself alive on nuts and berries. Elisha followed the same mode of life, inheriting from his teacher, besides many other good things, a love of the wilderness (cf. 2 Kgs. 2:25). John, too, dwelt in the wilderness of the Jordan, 'eating locusts and wild honey' (Mark 1:6) ; thus he showed us that our bodily needs can be satisfied without much trouble, and he reproached us for our elaborate pleasures. Possibly Moses was instituting a general law in this matter when he commanded the Israelites to gather daily no more than one day's supply of manna (cf. Exod. 16:16-17), thereby ordaining in a concealed fashion that men should live from day to day and not make preparations for the morrow. He thought it right that creatures made in the divine image should be content with whatever comes to hand and should trust God to supply the rest ; otherwise, by making provision for the future, they seem to lack faith in God's gifts of grace and to be afraid that He will cease to bestow His continual blessings upon mankind.

In short, this is why the saints, 'of whom the world was not worthy', left the inhabited regions and 'wandered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth', going about ' in sheepskins, in goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented' (Heb. 11:37-38). They fled from the sophisticated wickedness of men and from the unnatural things of which towns are full, not wishing to be swept off their feet and carried along with all the others into a whirlpool of confusion. They were glad to live with the wild beasts, judging them less harmful than their fellow men. They avoided men as being treacherous, while they trusted the animals as their friends ; for animals do not teach us to sin, but revere and respect holiness. Thus men tried to kill Daniel but the lions saved him, preserving him when he had been unjustly condemned out of malice (cf. Dan. 6:16-23) ; and when human justice had miscarried, the animals proclaimed his innocence. Whereas Daniel's holiness gave rise to strife and envy among men, among the wild animals it evoked awe and veneration.

-- from the Ascetic Discourse of St. Neilos the Ascetic. The Philokalia, Volume 1, pgs. 239-241.

As I have made mention of before, there is a passage somewhere in the C.S. Lewis corpus (I cannot remember where), in which Lewis asks whether or not there is such a thing as a Christian cuisine, and then answers his question in a manner which is more brief, but very much in keeping with, the above passage. Christian cuisine is plain and unadorned, unsophisticated, not concerned with variety or complexity, it does not manipulate or provoke the senses, it is honest. There was a time when the poor, by necessity, ate such a cuisine, but now, at least in the West, the poor are given a diet of processed culinary provocations of the most crass forms. No matter what socio-economic background one comes from today, to eat a Christian cuisine is to be out of step with the culture at large.

One notes the obvious connection between urban culture and pretentious culinary sophistication, and the obvious solution to this problem – withdrawal. I suppose that withdrawal for many of us Orthodox today might begin by ignoring the 15 food channels on cable (better yet, throwing away the TV), putting away our dozens of gourmet vegan cookbooks, and passing by the processed vegan food boxes with pretty pictures in the frozen food aisle – America offers us so many ways to stylize our fasting efforts. I wonder in what way a trendy fasting remains a fast.

Also noteworthy in the above passage is the connection between a rightly ordered culinary life and peace with the rest of creation. Animosity towards the rest of creation seems to ease when I do not depend upon creation, especially creation on my plate, to excite and provoke me.

I find such reflections as these given by St. Neilos very interesting. They are so obvious, right, and insightful, and so much at odds with the life I have lived, and the order of things we have all received from our mass instant “culture.”

We were on the small port-side deck of a boat, touring the Volga, out a bit from Moscow. It was nearing dusk. There was a summer mist over the river the likes of which I have seen neither before nor since, it hid even as it revealed. The card playing, laughter, and pear soda inside the vessel was not as worthy a weariness as the sight on the deck. The cadent grey of unkempt factories, against a green with the bright otherliness enough to make it all matter, mediated by the brown soil - which seen in a span of a good breadth conveys a portion of the life of Rus, and even her lesser deaths and the deaths of her enemies. After a long pause in conversation, she said, "I think you are a poet." Hmm. My father had taught me poetry enough that I knew what I wasn't. My mother had taught me that I was born an old man, as her father had been, and on occasion an old man in the body of a young man is mistaken for a poet. I felt for a cigarette in my pocket and then remembered with the empty cloth that I did not do that with this company. Ah, the situations that Nazarene friends will get you into. The next day we went to the Andronikov Monastery and saw some images. There was no mist there, the Monastery and the Yauza clear and crisp, as Russian summer days can be. And the next day, well, it does not matter. There are only moments. One might look back at them and half chuckle. When will you repent you damn old fool? But if I ever do, there is a place I remember as the first of a turning. O my God, thank you for this life.

chatter

Fr. Stephen Freeman reveals the heart of the matter of ecumenism with the succinctness and profundity we have come to expect from him. He touches on what might be loosely called modern agendism, and then gets to the moralism that is behind the whole facade.

An amiable RC seminarian in the thread writes of the two lung theory and reminds us with regard to the meeting of the two lungs that "it’s important to study" - the lingering notion that really what is needed is that we educate, educate, educate, and the problem will eventually be solved. Where have I heard this before?

Fr. Stephen's recognition of agendic moralism strikes me as precise. We see this now in so many arenas.

Take, for instance, so called environmentalism. The last decade's pet green project was the rainforests. This decade we are burning them down at an even greater pace, but we are much quieter about it now as a great deal of that land is going to grow crops for biodiesel, a product which has been shown to be as bad for the earth as that which it replaces. But the middle classes in the West demand biodiesels, because they want to consume at their regular pace yet feel better about it. Hence the moral quality of the issue. We know that your new Prius is far worse for the environment than had you kept your old 6 cylinder car for several more years (the energy spent to create a new vehicle, the increased problems with waste disposal when the Prius dies, etc.), but we know that environmentally conscious (read: morally superior) people drive a Prius. You buy CFL bulbs for your home, even though they take much more energy to manufacture than standard incandescent bulbs, and they will create a nightmare of mercury disposal issues if a large percentage of the population switches to them. We go to Whole Foods and buy organic food, but it turns out that Organic Valley farmers are getting the shaft from their co-op not unlike agridairy farmers, that most of the organic food sold at Whole Foods is produced by the same huge agribusiness interests that even when growing organically use techniques that harm the soil (and which make plenty of money on conventional farming while getting their hands on the Whole Foods niche profits as well), and, well, I'm sure you have heard it before but, how whole is your food when it is sold to you in a factory sealed plastic bag inside of a factory sealed cardboard box? But, of course, Whole Foods is where the moral elite shop, or so it is suggested with not so little subtlety.

If we want to bless the earth and not curse it, if we want to make some attempt not to use it as the trash bin of our disposable desirables, there is only one answer. Consume less. But that is no fun, is it? For we all want to say, "ah, to buy this thing is better than to buy that thing." In reality, the best thing is probably to go without. But that gets noticed less, and it is darn near impossible to make a movement out of it. Probably the most ecologically sound decision most of the readers here might make is to simply follow the Orthodox fasts - but as the Church makes very clear, this is to be done quietly.

Our world wants to solve every encountered problem. We will make war on poverty, and fight for justice and peace, and demand our civil liberties. There will be a lot of signs and shouting, and persons on TV screens whose heads do not move much as their lips sputter incessantly, more and more useless words. I remember reading in the TLS a decade or so ago a rather damning report on relief work in Ethiopia and elsewhere, describing how the massive relief campaigns of the West destroyed what remained of local economies and actually created later famines, exponentially increasing the number of deaths in those famine plagued regions. The plans of men, and always with that moral urgency. Yes, there is, quite obviously, no movement of any sort in the habitat of waiting, of being still, of being given to what is in front of you, of possessing only what is yours to possess and even trying to own less of that. As Wendell Berry reminds us, we must always be aware of the vastness of our own ignorances. When humans are convinced they know the answer to what they perceive to be the urgent problem in front of them, there is usually the creation of an even greater problem.

It seems that our elders and fathers in the faith are constantly calling us to not place much trust in ourselves, and to not place much trust in those passion filled arenas which demand our allegiance and expect our excitement. It seems to me that the bulk of what is promoted as "ecumenical," just as the bulk of what passes for "environmental" amounts to nothing more than ideological hubris. A place to throw one's soul away while thinking one's self better than other men.

not suitable for children

Thankfully, I don't have much time to surf the net anymore. I read the blogs and sites I read. But very occasionally one gets a moment of web decadence.

The internet is, by and large, a horror show of late modern culture, and this is true of theo-blogdom as much or more so than anything else. But hands down, the most disturbing thing I have ever seen in pixels is this.

Now there is an image that will take a long time to get out of my head. Along with the recurrence of those painful flashbacks Baptist minister's sons sometimes get. And it's a fast day thus I can't even resort to some 80 proof liquid Ireland.

Thanks, if that is the right word, to The Voice of Stefan for the link.

attention and its discontents....

My brother-in-law, Jason, has been in Memphis from Wisconsin these past 10 days and we have been quite busy with visits to a Redbirds game, the Botanical Gardens, the local Skete, the local Ethiopian restaurant, the local Irish Disneyland restaurant (Celtic Crossing; great rooms), Boscos for the beer and nothing else (I need to find a Ralph Lauren polo shirt at Goodwill so that I can fit in better there), the P & H, the Cove, church, Autozone when the car broke down, the downtown farmers market (twice) and a few other places. I will try to resume posting at some point soon. I have been working on a post on Orthodoxy and agrarianisms, but that may take some time.

I would like to comment on two essays that are superb. Both of these should now be considered required reading for ochlophobists. I learned of both at Arts & Letters Daily.

Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic has an essay, Is Google Making Us Stupid, here is a long quotation:

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

...Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Christine Rosen of the New Atlantic offers the essay The Myth of Multitasking. Here are portions:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets—particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices—celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. The word multitasking began appearing in the “skills” sections of résumés, as office workers restyled themselves as high-tech, high-performing team players. “We have always multitasked—inability to walk and chew gum is a time-honored cause for derision—but never so intensely or self-consciously as now,” James Gleick wrote in his 1999 book Faster. “We are multitasking connoisseurs—experts in crowding, pressing, packing, and overlapping distinct activities in our all-too-finite moments.” An article in the New York Times Magazine in 2001 asked, “Who can remember life before multitasking? These days we all do it.” The article offered advice on “How to Multitask” with suggestions about giving your brain’s “multitasking hot spot” an appropriate workout.

But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.”

...If, as Poldrack concluded, “multitasking changes the way people learn,” what might this mean for today’s children and teens, raised with an excess of new entertainment and educational technology, and avidly multitasking at a young age? Poldrack calls this the “million-dollar question.” Media multitasking—that is, the simultaneous use of several different media, such as television, the Internet, video games, text messages, telephones, and e-mail—is clearly on the rise, as a 2006 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed: in 1999, only 16 percent of the time people spent using any of those media was spent on multiple media at once; by 2005, 26 percent of media time was spent multitasking. “I multitask every single second I am online,” confessed one study participant. “At this very moment I am watching TV, checking my e-mail every two minutes, reading a newsgroup about who shot JFK, burning some music to a CD, and writing this message.”

The Kaiser report noted several factors that increase the likelihood of media multitasking, including “having a computer and being able to see a television from it.” Also, “sensation-seeking” personality types are more likely to multitask, as are those living in “a highly TV-oriented household.” The picture that emerges of these pubescent multitasking mavens is of a generation of great technical facility and intelligence but of extreme impatience, unsatisfied with slowness and uncomfortable with silence: “I get bored if it’s not all going at once, because everything has gaps—waiting for a website to come up, commercials on TV, etc.” one participant said. The report concludes on a very peculiar note, perhaps intended to be optimistic: “In this media-heavy world, it is likely that brains that are more adept at media multitasking will be passed along and these changes will be naturally selected,” the report states. “After all, information is power, and if one can process more information all at once, perhaps one can be more powerful.” This is techno-social Darwinism, nature red in pixel and claw.

...When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention. People who have achieved great things often credit for their success a finely honed skill for paying attention. When asked about his particular genius, Isaac Newton responded that if he had made any discoveries, it was “owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.”

William James, the great psychologist, wrote at length about the varieties of human attention. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), he outlined the differences among “sensorial attention,” “intellectual attention,” “passive attention,” and the like, and noted the “gray chaotic indiscriminateness” of the minds of people who were incapable of paying attention. James compared our stream of thought to a river, and his observations presaged the cognitive “bottlenecks” described later by neurologists: “On the whole easy simple flowing predominates in it, the drift of things is with the pull of gravity, and effortless attention is the rule,” he wrote. “But at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other way.”

To James, steady attention was thus the default condition of a mature mind, an ordinary state undone only by perturbation. To readers a century later, that placid portrayal may seem alien—as though depicting a bygone world. Instead, today’s multitasking adult may find something more familiar in James’s description of the youthful mind: an “extreme mobility of the attention” that “makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” For some people, James noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work done “in the interstices of their mind-wandering.” Like Chesterfield, James believed that the transition from youthful distraction to mature attention was in large part the result of personal mastery and discipline—and so was illustrative of character. “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again,” he wrote, “is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

Today, our collective will to pay attention seems fairly weak. We require advice books to teach us how to avoid distraction. In the not-too-distant future we may even employ new devices to help us overcome the unintended attention deficits created by today’s gadgets. As one New York Times article recently suggested, “Further research could help create clever technology, like sensors or smart software that workers could instruct with their preferences and priorities to serve as a high tech ‘time nanny’ to ease the modern multitasker’s plight.” Perhaps we will all accept as a matter of course a computer governor—like the devices placed on engines so that people can’t drive cars beyond a certain speed. Our technological governors might prompt us with reminders to set mental limits when we try to do too much, too quickly, all at once.

Then again, perhaps we will simply adjust and come to accept what James called “acquired inattention.” E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming—all this may become background noise, like the “din of a foundry or factory” that James observed workers could scarcely avoid at first, but which eventually became just another part of their daily routine. For the younger generation of multitaskers, the great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.

From the hand of Aidan Hart, see here.

the nude 'tween branding

One of the pleasures of being a subscriber to Mars Hill Audio Journal is, of all things, getting Ken Myers' fundraising letters in the mail. This is from the June 2008 letter:

The image in Vanity Fair of Miley Cyrus (also apparently nude, though modestly draped with a sheet) has evoked intense media scrutiny and widespread parental anxiety over the apparently important question: Has this wholesome role model been stained by this arguably provocative photo? I’m sure there are Christian moms who were asking this question, since there are many Christian moms glad to have Miley Cyrus on their side in the battle against the sluttiness of ’tween culture.

Let me suggest that these moms are, to put it bluntly, missing the point, and that if the Christian communities to which they belong fail to encourage them to see their present anxiety as short-sighted, both they and their daughters are in deeper trouble than they know.

...Miley Cyrus (now 15) plays the lead character on Hannah Montana, a character named Miley Stewart. Stewart has migrated west from her humble Tennessee origins to live in Malibu, to pursue her dreams as a superstar singer known to the public as Hannah Montana. Hannah Montana is thus a persona, an alternate identity assumed by Miley Stewart. Miley Stewart is also a character, performed by Miley Cyrus. What makes it even more reflexive is that Miley Cyrus performs in concert as Hannah Montana, bypassing Ms. Stewart entirely. One might ask if Miley Cyrus is really a celebrity pop sensation, or whether she just pretends to be a pop sensation when she’s in character. This confusion is central to the disorders encouraged by celebrity culture.

Then there are the story lines of the show, which publicists say is about the challenges of wanting to be treated like a normal teenager while surrounded by limos, expensive clothes, and screaming worshippers (exactly why this might be instructive to kids, I’m not sure). But, as critic Meghan O’Rourke observed at Slate.com, "[W]e don’t see all that much of Miley being a real person, going to school, riding the school bus. Instead, the show is really about being a pop star. . . . [The show] teaches kids to understand their own experiences—about growing pains, about being honest with their parents, and so on—through the narrow lens of teen celebrity." O’Rourke concludes that "the entire show is a canny celebration of pop culture masquerading as a story about hope and family life."

The question moms (and dads) need to be asking is not whether Miley/Miley/Hannah is going to go all Britney on them, but whether their six- and seven-year-old daughters really benefit from having as a guide to growing up a performer playing a performer playing a performer. Just as the most important lesson taught by Sesame Street is that learning must be fun, so the most important lesson taught by Hannah Montana may be that growing up is about learning how to perform one’s life, how to define your identity as a desirable commodity, how to assemble and project the brand called Me.

The culture of celebrity and personal performance which permeates our society is profoundly destructive. It’s not simply that being well-known for simply being well-known (in Daniel Boorstin’s classic formulation) is a thin and vapid achievement. More fundamentally disordering is the way in which the deeply sensed notion of "identity as performance" promoted in the culture of celebrity undercuts the very idea of reality or real life; more than the work of nihilistic philosophers, the prominence of performers in our society nudges us toward referring to "reality" (with the ironizing quotation marks) rather than to Reality.

Here one is given to recall Fr. Alexander Schmemann's loose thoughts on American culture, and its great aversion to reality, as he saw it.

Lord, have mercy.

I struggle now with forming in my mind the conversations I know that I will be having with my daughters. No, you will not purchase x cd. No, you will not purchase y stylized piece of clothing after the fashion of some celebrity. No, you will not attend z mass/pop culture event. --- That part is easy enough. Where its gets tricky is the why. I will explain what Myers is teaching above to my 11 year old, or so I have some confidence. I think one can articulate how it is that this cd or this piece of clothing or this mass culture event is anti-human and participation in it de-humanizes the participator. That such is the demonic spirit of the age - a principality and power that rules persons without their knowing it. Fine and well. But then, how does one explain all this in a manner that is not judgmental toward the bulk of persons we know - neighbors, family, friends, coreligionists? How does one articulate as much without introducing the pride of separatism, especially since in today's culture anything done which makes one stand out is assumed to be done in order to brand one's self in a notable, particular style? How do you teach your daughter that there is a reality, that most folks in various fashion reject that reality, that the manifold instances of this rejection are nuanced and tricky, that we must see ourselves as no better than those who embrace such rejection, that one can brand the rejection of the rejection of reality which is itself a rejection of reality (thus the need for constant discernment and awareness), and that, in the end, all this not rejecting of reality which operates through the rejection of popular activities must be done in the spirit of gratefulness and life, full of the proper Orthodox joie de vivre?

Good grief. And there are no hills to run to anymore. At least the only ones I could afford to get to are not far enough away.

the ultimate neo-con-neo-cath

From the Telegraph:

George W Bush and Pope Benedict XVI have held an intimate meeting in Rome as rumours mounted in Italy that the president may follow in Tony Blair's footsteps and convert to Catholicism.

....Mr Bush has filled the White House with Catholic speech-writers and consultants and is also thought to have asked a Catholic priest to bless the West Wing.

Before he became president, Karl Rove, his former political adviser, invited Catholic intellectuals to Texas to lecture the candidate on the church's teachings. Mr Bush appointed the Catholic judges Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court.

However, it is thought unlikely that Mr Bush would convert until after he has left office. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, has already converted to Catholicism.

Catholics have noted that during the contested election in 2000, Jeb Bush travelled to Mexico and prayed to the icon of Our Lady of Guadelupe. His victory was announced by the Supreme Court on December 12, the feast day of the Lady of Guadelupe.

Poor David Schindler and the Communio Catholics. They must be shaking their heads in anticipation of the slightly witty gloating which will come from the First Things neo-con neo-Cath circles, especially if BenXVI himself confirms Bush. Well, it seems that no matter where one goes ecclesially, it pays to be able to pay. St. James' concerns remain. "You sit here in a good place."

I especially liked this part:

George William Rutler, a New York-based priest who is close to the president, was quoted by the Washington Post earlier this year saying that Mr Bush "is not unaware of how evangelism, by comparison with Catholicism, may seem more limited both theologically and historically".

I do doubt that the always rhetorically competent Fr. Rutler mistakes evangelism with Evangelicalism. Must ignorance always pervade journalism? Well, yes.

not that this is news anymore, but nonetheless....

Mr. Gramling's Flamingo Road Church, which has a weekly attendance of 8,000, is based in Broward County, Fla., where he records his sermons on DVD for screenings here, as well as at three branches in South Florida. Each church uses the same distinctive music, banners and logo -- a white cube bisected by a black curving road. Mr. Gramling says he tried to copy the success of Starbucks by assembling a creative team to hone "the look, the feel, the branding idea, of what Flamingo Road is." Like Starbucks, Mr. Gramling is thinking big. His goal is 50 churches world-wide, 100,000 members and a $150 million-a-year budget.

At least half a dozen U.S. mega-churches have opened international branches in recent years, and plans are in the works for many more. "If Starbucks can start four stores a day, why can't churches?" says John Bishop, the pastor at Living Hope Church. His congregation in Vancouver, Wash., which has a weekly attendance of 6,000, has 23 satellite churches, including new sites in New Zealand, India, Mexico and the Philippines. The Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge, La., has eight U.S. branches, and in the past year opened churches in Mozambique and Swaziland. Celebration Church in Jacksonville, Fla., with 10,000 members, recently launched branches in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe and Atiquipa, Peru. "We try to keep consistent what we call the DNA of our church, much like a business would," says Celebration's pastor, Stovall Weems.

...Flamingo Road, which is named after the street that fronts the main church, spends about $130,000 a year to run its Lima branch, a fraction of its $7.5 million annual budget. That money, as well as plans to spend $1 million on a live satellite system to link the campuses, are strategic investments for a toehold in a growing overseas market. [bold emphasis mine]

"The religious market is saturated in the U.S.," says Manuel Vasquez, co-author of "Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas." "There is a sense now that you have to go international to expand your reach if you want to be a player."

The Lima church receives weekly FedEx shipments with components of the Flamingo Road brand: Mr. Gramling's recorded sermons; business cards with the church name, logo and service times; color brochures that advertise sermon themes for the month, and MTV-style documentaries on such topics as lust and temptation for the youth services. Staff members and volunteers get Flamingo Road T-shirts and dog tags.

Inside the theater, about 150 worshippers clapped and swayed to a 10-piece rock band. "God is awesome, he's so awesome, God is awesome in this place," they sang. During his sermon, Mr. Gramling compared King David's struggle to control his desire for the married woman Bathsheba with WWE wrestling.

....Flamingo Road and other fledgling church chains compete with mainstream denominations and local churches. Critics say franchise churches are culturally homogenous and sap local congregations, just as Wal-Mart and other big retailers squash local competitors. "The downside of McDonaldization is that everything is the same, everything is predictable," says Kurt Fredrickson of Fuller Theological Seminary. "When you're franchised, it becomes more difficult for the local flavor to come through."

Mr. Bishop, of Living Hope Church, says he is expanding abroad in part because of demand: Christians in other countries invite him to launch Living Hope churches. "It's like they're asking us, 'Can we please sell Nikes in our country?' " Mr. Bishop says. "They just love the brand."

--- Excerpts from the article Inspired by Starbucks, by ALEXANDRA ALTER, in today's WSJ.

Even Fredrickson of Fuller scares me. Is the alternative to McDonaldization Christianity a "local flavor" Christianity? Thus it is either mass marketed church or boutique church? God help us.

The article mentions Philip Jenkins' views on the growth of Christianity, "By 2025, seven of 10 Christians will live in Africa, Latin America and Asia..." As one who was once in Protestant missionary circles and has heard many missionaries describe the growing Christianities in these regions, indeed even listening to my wife describe the dismal house church movement in China (she lived there for a year) which is so lauded by Jenkins and American Evangelicals, I am not one who would agree with Jenkins' use of the term Christian here. These branded churches, and the various house church, Pentecostal, mass Evangelical, and other movements of the same sort, are usually both in theology and praxis as far from Christian as Mormons or practitioners of Wicca or agnostic secularists.

scene from an ochlophobic life, accompanied by befitting Muir poem.

The Mountains

The days have closed behind my back
Since I came into these hills.
Now memory is a single field
One peasant tills and tills.

So far away, if I should turn
I know I could not find
That place again. These mountains make
The backward gaze half-blind,

Yet sharp my sight till it can catch
The ranges rising clear
Far in futurity's high-walled land;
But I am rooted here.

And do not know where lies my way,
Backward or forward. If I could
I'd leap time's bound or turn and hide
From time in my ancestral wood.

Double delusion! Here I'm held
By the mystery of a rock,
Must watch in a perpetual dream
The horizon's gates unlock and lock,

See on the harvest fields of time
The mountains heaped like sheaves,
And the valleys opening out
Like a volume's turning leaves,

Dreaming of a peak whose height
Will show me every hill,
A single mountain on whose side
Life blooms for ever and is still.

- from the Collected Poems of Edwin Muir.

The sunflower is from the old man who sells them for $1 each at the MFM, the one who grew up with the grandfather of the fellow who with his wife runs Whitton Flowers & Produce which also sells real flowers. The vellum is from some poor Flemish calf who died 650 years ago, or so. The psalm shown is the first portion of Exultate justi (Psalm 32), a psalm which might be read as something of a response to Muir's longing.

A more full view of mystery, though one not contrary to the view expressed in the post below, and along with it a critique of the peculiar modern idolatry of knowledge, is to be found in Andrew Louth's Discerning the Mystery, which thanks to Biblicalia, I learned 8th Day is now selling for $25 plus shipping.

The blurb you have probably read before:

Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology
by Andrew Louth

Published: 2007, 150p, paper

Published twenty-five years ago, this book is still the finest critique of the Enlightenment’s ways of knowing, coupled with a winsome description of a distinctly Christian alternative. Responding to what he sees as a “division and fragmentation” both in theology and the larger culture due to “the one-sided way we have come to seek and recognize truth…manifest in the way in which all concern with truth has been relinquished to the sciences,” Louth sets out to describe the source of that fragmentation and to challenge the notion that we must “accept the lot bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment.” He carefully reviews central themes of several precursors who have already forged a critique of the epistemological imperialism of the Enlightenment, principally Giambattista Vico, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who in distinct ways demonstrated the legitimacy of the humanities’ unique apprehension of truth. Further relativizing Enlightenment claims, Michael Polanyi proposed that science itself depends on non-empirical elements of investigation for its method to function, what he termed “the tacit dimension.” It is here that Louth sees a “pattern underlying the apprehension of truth” that is strikingly similar to that of the Fathers of the Church, who set forth an approach to knowing and experiencing truth that ultimately can be “seen and heard and handled” (1 John 1:1-3), but only by those who reside in the bosom of the Church’s tradition and avail themselves of ways of knowing unique to it. Louth’s rather brilliant rehabilitation of the Fathers’ use of allegory in scriptural interpretation, which interweaves Scripture and tradition seamlessly, illustrates this approach. The matrix of allegory requires and manifests the “tacit dimension” of the guidance of the Spirit, and underlines the theologian’s need to hear Him. Or as Evagrios of Pontus might put it, “Knowledge of God—the breast of the Lord. To recline there—the making of a theologian.”

This is a great chance to own an important volume at a reasonable price.

I wonder if a good companion volume of sorts might be THE VIRTUES OF IGNORANCE Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge by Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson, Editors.

Consider:

As our dependence on technology has increased precipitously over the past centuries, so too has the notion that we can solve all environmental problems with scientific explanations. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge proposes an alternative to this dangerous worldview. The contributing authors argue that our reliance on scientific knowledge has created many of the problems that now plague the globe and that our wholesale dependence on scientific progress is both untenable and myopic. They conclude that we must simply accept that our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge and always will.

Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson and a diverse group of thinkers, including Wendell Berry, Anna Peterson, and Robert Root-Bernstein, offer insights on the advantages of an ignorance-based worldview. Their essays explore the entire realm of this philosophy, from its origins and its essence to how its implementation can preserve vital natural resources for future generations. The Virtues of Ignorance argues that knowledge-based worldviews are more dangerous than useful and looks ahead to determine how humans can live sustainably on Earth.

ignorance vs. techno-ideology

This is part of what led to a conference we held in 2004 called "Toward an Ignorance-based Worldview." The inspiration started with a letter Wendell Berry wrote to me in 1982. Here are parts of it:

I want to try to complete the thought about "randomness" that I was working on when we talked the other day. The Hans Jenny paragraph that started me off is the last on page 21 of The Soil Resource:

"Raindrops that pass in random fashion through an imaginary plain above the forest canopy are intercepted by leaves and twigs and channeled into distinctive vert space patterns of through-drip, crown-drip and stem flow. The soil surface, as receiver, transmits the "rain message" downward, but as the subsoils lack a power source to mold a flow design, the water tends to leave the ecosystem as it entered it, in randomized fashion."

My question is: Does "random" in this (or any) context describe a verifiable condition or a limit of perception?

My answer is: It describes a limit of perception. This is, of course, not a scientist's answer, but it may be that anybody's answer would be unscientific. My answer is based on the belief that pattern is verifiable by limited information, whereas the information required to verify randomness is unlimited. As I think you said when we talked, what is perceived as random within a given limit may be seen as a part of a pattern within a wider limit.

If this is so, then Dr. Jenny, for accuracy's sake, should have said that rainwater moves from mystery through pattern back into mystery.

To call the unknown "random" is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known. (A result that our friend Dr. Jenny, of course, did not propose and would not condone.)

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