Year: 2013

Beth Haile dissects the moral theology in Les Miserables (spoiler alert):

In the end, Valjean is a man, "no worse than any other man," as he explains to Javert. The critical difference between the two is that Valjean is willing to live out a life of mercy. He is willing to both give and receive it while Javert can do neither. When Valjean offers Javert mercy, saving his life at the barricade, Javert is tormented. His system is broken, his god dead. As his world comes crashing down, he plunges into the Seine. Valjean, on the other hand, looking up with shame into the eyes of the bishop whom he just stole from, chooses to accept mercy, and then give it in return–to Fantine, to Cosette, to Marius, and even to his enemy.

Victor Hugo apparently had a strained relationship to the faith but the story has a very Christian message: "To love another person is to see the face of God."

Laurie Fendrich searches for the reason the "wider intellectual world" of scholars and intellectuals has given short shrift to the rogue art criticism of Dave Hickey. She finds that it comes down to biography:

Scholars find it difficult to accept that he chose to make Las Vegas his home for most of his adult life. They are put off by the fact that he calms himself by gambling and chain-smoking. They are contemptuous of his spending a lot of his early years consumed by rock 'n' roll, hanging out with the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Tosches, and Lester Bangs, and writing articles about (to use Hickey's words) "subjects with the shelf life of milk." Academics don't understand how a serious intellectual could have spent so many years not doing academic work, instead snorting cocaine and jamming with the Nashville-based singer-songwriter Marshall Chapman.

Late last year, Hickey announced his semi-retirement from art criticism, lamenting how the art world has changed:

I have to emphasize that I think the art is great. There’s as much good art out there now as there was in—maybe not in 1968—but certainly there’s as much good art as there was in 1978 or 1988. The difference? The art world used to let in gangs—the Pop gang, the Minimalist gang—and now they let artists in one at a time and isolate them from their peers. This is bad medicine. So, if you’re an artist, join a gang. Make up signs. Demand respect, but don’t drive-by critics. It’s our job to hurt you. Sorry about that.

There’s no such thing, according to Edith Zimmerman:

After editing an advice column for two years, I’ve decided that there is no such thing as advice. There are only problems and the ways people handle them. Advice, on the other hand, is when you hear a description of someone else’s problem and then tell the person something about yourself. Hopefully whatever you say is funny or interesting, but it has little to do with actually helping anyone. It may seem or feel like it does, but there are always more variables than we’ll ever be able to see or understand, and best case scenario you’re pressing on the problem a little bit in a way that engages the problem-haver.

Maria Bustillos approaches the quandary from a different angle:

Anybody who supposes himself wise is already demonstrating the reverse. Therefore the cleverest, most beneficial advice must always come disguised as something else. Because who can ever really believe that he knows better?

Jay Michaelson critiques the new film adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, hesitating at its "tendency to secularize sensuality—precisely to reduce it to hedonism," and thus missing the deeply spiritual impulse behind many of the Beats:

With the sensual spirituality (or spiritual paganism, if you like) secularized into mere “kicks,” the moral balance of On the Road lurches to one side. In the book, there’s a productive tension between the evanescent, yet incandescent, mysticism of pure human experience on the one hand, and the deep ethical consequences of human relationship on the other. This is a crucial and recurring religious polarity, between the immediacy of spirit and the temporality of ethics, between the circle and the line, the Now and what’s next. But take out the spirituality of one side, and what’s left is an almost puritanical judgment on the other.

A recent NYT article covers trends in American Christianity, such as meeting in movie theaters and coffee houses. Pivoting off the article, Walter Russell Mead declares that "[e]ntrepreneurialism and adaptation is in the DNA of American religion," and sounds a hopeful note about the religious life of millennials:

In America today, Catholic, liberal Protestant, evangelical and African American churches all in their different ways face the challenge of a generation that isn’t necessarily happy with the forms of faith they’ve been offered. As millennials mature in their personal faith and their theological and cultural reflections, we should expect this generation to come forward with new ways of stating and living the Christian message. There will be conflict and wrangling; “New Lights” and “Old Lights” will struggle over doctrine and practice as they have done since Jonathan Edwards’ critics attacked the Great Awakening. But if history is any guide, the new generation will find and express an authentic and compelling interpretation of the ancient faith, and American politics and culture will be shaped in large measure by the answers the millennials find.

Rod Dreher, while skeptical of such trends, finds a potential upside to these churches:

I think these nouveau Protestant guys are onto something with their ideas of church coffee shops and other community-center activities. In medieval times, the church was not only the place for liturgy, but was also a community center of sorts. In Chartres, for example, the great cathedral was in those days a community gathering place; merchants even sold goods inside the church when liturgies weren’t going on. That may have been pushing it too far, but as a general matter, I think it’s not a bad thing at all when a community makes the church a center of its common life, and not just during worship.

Hamilton Nolan rips into the tendency of young writers “to exploit every last tawdry twist and turn of their own lives for profit.” On the journalistic culture of innumerable memoirs and confessional essays:

The demoralizing truth is that there is a huge appetite for first-person essays of this sort. The pages of Salon, and Slate, and Thought Catalog, and XO Jane, and women’s magazines, and lowbrow-masquerading-as-highbrow publications like parts of the New York Times, and Gawker Media are absolutely overflowing with them. At their very best, they offer some amount of insight learned through experience. Mostly, they offer run of the mill voyeurism tinged with the desperation of attention addiction. For those who own the publications, they’re great—they bring in the clickety-clicks. But for the writers themselves, they are a short-lived and ultimately demeaning game. They are a path that ends in hackdom. And young writers who’ve paid good money to attend journalism classes should not be set on that path.

In an article we linked to earlier, Ann Friedman pushes back and uses the Dish, among others, as an example:

Two of my very favorite long-form feature writers, John Jeremiah Sullivan and Mac McClelland, are adept at weaving personal stories with their reporting. (Read this and this and this—and, just to bring it full circle, this from Andrew Sullivan—then try and tell me you still think good reporters don’t get personal.) There is an art to getting personal without obscuring the real story. Just as there’s an art to infusing your tweets and your commentary with a tinge of your nonprofessional life without going the full confessional.