2013 – Page 760

To the Wonder‘s Reading List

Bilge Ebiri offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how Terrence Malick made To the Wonder, including these details about how the director used art and literature to inspire cast and crew:

As prompts for the actors, Malick shared representative works of art and literature. For Affleck, he suggested Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. (Affleck read Martin Heidegger on his own, having known that Malick had translated one of the German philosopher’s works as a grad student.) For Kurylenko, he also recommended Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — specifically, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot. “Those books were, in a way, his script,” she says. But he did more than give the actors the books; he suggested ways to approach the texts and characters to focus on. So, for example, he recommended that Kurylenko read The Idiot with a particular eye on two characters: the young and prideful Aglaya Yepanchin, and the fallen, tragic Nastassya Filippovna. “He wanted me to combine their influences — the romantic and innocent side, with the insolent and daring side. ‘For some reason, you only ever see that combination in Russian characters,’ he said to me.”

In fact, Malick will use existing works of art and literature as touch-points with virtually all of his cast and crew. “It enables them to have a common vernacular on set that’s not about technique, but emotion — a shared memory,” Gonda says. For example, with the producers, the director often referenced paintings. With camera operator Widmer, who is also an accomplished musician, the references were often musical. With his editing team, Malick often passed out books such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. But he would also reference other films: Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, with its heavy and unique use of voice-over, was a constant reference point. (At one point, the score for Truffaut’s film was used as part of a temp soundtrack.) Malick is also a huge fan of Jean-Luc Godard and often referenced Godard films such as Breathless, Pierrot le Fou, and Vivre Sa Vie, for their elliptical narrative and editing styles.

Previous Dish on the film here, here, here and here.

(Photo of Mont Saint-Michel, featured prominently in To the Wonder, via Wikimedia Commons)

To Doubt Is Christian

Christopher Hutton argues that doubt and skepticism are not just for atheists and agnostics, but should be embraced by Christians as an integral part of a fully-lived faith:

Doubt is a thing which many Christians see as opposing their faith. Many have fought it and its prevalence in the modern minds of man. 19th century pastor Robert Turnbull once stated that “Doubt, indeed, is the disease of this inquisitive, restless age.” Many people react negatively towards any feelings of doubt that they may have, fearing that this doubt means that they aren’t fully committed to God.

However, this fear of doubt is dreadfully dangerous. Not every man who doubts his faith loses it. And if they look at most human lives, they’ll find that if one doesn’t doubt, then one isn’t human. It is a necessary idea for any believer, for it acts as the catalyst and tool for a man or woman to grow.

He goes on to highlight this passage from Timothy Keller:

A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection. Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts—not only their own but their friends’ and neighbors’.

Faces Of The Day

For Colors magazine, photographer Jen Osborne followed two therapy llamas on their rounds:

Animals have been used in medical settings for more than a hundred years, according to NPR’s Julie Rovner, but scientists have only recently discovered the link between exposure to animals and increased oxytocin levels—which can lead to feelings of happiness and trust. Household pets like dogs and cats are commonly trained as therapy animals, as are dolphins and horses. Llamas, however, are a novelty, as Osborne found out on her one-day assignment.

(Jen Osborne for COLORS №83 — Happiness: a survival guide)

The Is And The Ought

Thomas de Zengotita offers a lengthy, searching critique of evolutionary psychology, summarizing a core feature of his argument this way:

It comes down to this: we cannot find truly ethical guidance in a nature shaped by evolution. Natural selection is random—random as to the mutations that produce variation, random as to the accidents of circumstance that make one variant adaptive and another fatal. Natural selection may indeed be responsible for something like a “mother instinct” that inspires tender mammalian behaviors of which we all approve. But natural selection may also be responsible for our instinctive tendency to fear what is strange and attack what is feared, thus contributing to the pageant of slaughter that has been human history. Ethical thought must take into account what Darwinian nature has made of us, and political provision must be made for that. But nothing ethical per se—nothing good or bad or even meaningful is to be found there.

The Second Miracle Of John Paul II

Vatican doctors have given it their stamp of approval:

[T]he medical council of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints has recognized as inexplicable one healing attributed to the blessed John Paul II. A supposed “miracle” that, if it is also approved by theologians and the cardinals (as it is very likely), will bring the Polish Pope, who died in 2005, the halo of sainthood in record time, just eight years after his death.

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf explains what the medical council’s finding indicates:

Keep in mind that in the long process of coming to a reasonable surety that a miracle was worked by God through the intercession of the Blessed or Venerable in question, when it is a matter of a healing miracle, there is a board of medical doctors and experts that look at the evidence to try to determine a) what were the conditions, b) what actually happened and c) whether it is explicable in terms of the normal workings of nature and medicine. So, the approval of the “consulta medica” is a big step, but not the last step.

(Photo: Workers put together elements of a 13,8m tall sculpture of late Pope John Paul II in Czestochowa, southern Poland on April 7, 2013. By Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty Images.)

Is Monotheism Murderous?

Richard Wolin profiles the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, describing one of his more controversial ideas this way:

Assmann argues that biblical monotheism, as codified by the Pentateuch, disrupted the political and cultural stability of the ancient world by introducing the concept of “religious exclusivity”: that is, by claiming, as no belief system had previously, that its God was the one true God, and that, correspondingly, all other gods were false. By introducing the idea of the “one true God,” Assmann suggests that monotheism upended one of the basic precepts of ancient polytheism: the principle of “divine translatability.” This notion meant that, in ancient Mesopotamia, the various competing deities and idols possessed a fundamental equivalence. This equivalence provided the basis for a constructive modus vivendi among the major empires and polities that predominated in the ancient world.

Assmann readily admits that the ancient Middle East was hardly an unending expanse of peaceable kingdoms. However, he suggests that before monotheism’s emergence, the rivalries and conflicts at issue were predominantly political rather than religious in nature. For this reason, they could be more readily contained. Monotheism raised the stakes of these skirmishes to fever pitch. According to Assmann, with monotheism’s advent, it became next to impossible to separate narrowly political disagreements from religious disputes about “ultimate ends” (Max Weber) or “comprehensive doctrines” (John Rawls). According to the new logic of “religious exclusivity,” political opponents to be conquered were turned into theological “foes” to be decimated.

In addition to coming perilously close to rehashing anti-Semitic tropes, Wolin argues that Assmann’s theories only tell part of the story:

A major failing of Assmann’s approach is that it systematically neglects ancient Judaism’s robust moral inclinations toward tolerance and neighborly love. Numerous prescriptions in the Old Testament, known as the Noachide Laws, stress the importance of providing hospitality and succor to strangers. As we read in Leviticus (19:33-34): “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as your self, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Thus, contra Assmann, lurid tales of plunder, bloodlust, and divine retribution fail to tell the whole story.

The View From Your Window

West Village, New York, 11.43 am

An Unappealing Universe?

Jim Holt thinks “the universe is more ugly than it is beautiful”:

[T]he form we can expect reality to take at its most general level is that of an infinite, incomplete mediocre mess. The laws of physics are not particularly elegant. The ingredients of the universe show no aesthetic parsimony. There are 60 odd elementary particles. That’s way more than is necessary. If the universe is created by a God it’s a God with no sense of economy or elegance.

He also responds to the idea that beauty is “the mystery of life”:

I think the delight one experiences in grasping a truth is the same sort of delight that’s elicited by beauty. I hate to make the hoary old distinction between the beautiful and the sublime but I think that things that are deeply mysterious don’t appeal to me. I’m irritated by mystery. It’s a temperamental thing. I know some people love it. So the day is beautiful and the night is sublime, as Kant said fatuously in one of his early works. The day is flooded with sunlight and everything is crisp and clear in its contours whereas the night is obscurity with these pinpricks of light that are stars. In the extremely unlikely event that all cosmic mystery is somehow dissolved, I don’t think that will destroy my aesthetic appreciation of the cosmos, but then I don’t think the cosmos is an aesthetically satisfying object as a whole. It’s a botched job! I think we should send it back and get a new one!

Last year the Dish had Jim on as an Ask Anything guest – watch those videos here.

What God’s Love Feels Like

This month Brennan Manning, author of The Ragamuffin Gospel, passed away. Donald Miller shares a beautiful anecdote about the late priest and writer’s connection to Shel Silverstein:

[The Giving Tree‘s] a wonderful and sad story about the nature of love, about how true love holds up even while being used. It’s a violent and painful story depending on how you look at it.

What many people don’t know about that story is that Brennan Manning, who passed away on Friday of last week, and Shel Silverstein met when they were young and according to Manning, stayed in touch. Later, after Shel began to write and Manning became a priest, they had a conversation about God and God’s love. Manning asked Silverstein what he thought God’s love felt like. Silverstein thought about it for a while but had no answer. Much later, Silverstein got in touch with Manning and gave him a copy of The Giving Tree saying the book was his answer to Manning’s question.

Manning told the story so many times you have to wonder if it didn’t become his answer, too. I’ve abused God and He forgives me, Manning seems to be saying.

(Hat tip: Mockingbird)

The Secularization Of Buddhism

Anne Kingston examines the mainstreaming of Buddhist “mindfulness”:

Donald Lopez, a professor of Buddhist and Tibetan studies at the University of Michigan, calls “secular Buddhism” an oxymoron: “Buddhism has always been a religion,” he says. “To see it as a way of life is a modern conceit that disparages the lives and religious practices of Buddhists over thousands of years.” The author of The Scientific Buddha, published in 2012, says belief that “mindfulness” is an ancient Buddhist practice is a fallacy: “There’s a cachet that comes from saying some ancient sage a millennium ago in India invented these things,” he says. Lopez traces mindfulness as we know it to a quest to preserve Buddhism in Burma after the British occuptation in the 19th century; they deposed the king and destroyed the hierarchical Buddhist institution: “Some monks saw the British arrival as a sign of approaching apocalypse,” he says. “So they disseminated Buddhist philosophy and practice through the population.” That included meditation, traditionally done only by monks. “It was totally about self-preservation.”