Month: May 2013

Mike Springer highlights an odd, fascinating documentary about William Faulkner:

In November of 1952, the normally reclusive Faulkner allowed a film crew into his secluded world at Oxford to make a short documentary about his life. The film, shown here in five pieces, was funded by the Ford Foundation and broadcast on December 28, 1952 on the CBS television program Omnibus. The scripted film re-enacts events from November 1950, when Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Literature, through the spring of 1951, when he spoke at his daughter Jill’s high school graduation.

It turns out Faulkner was better on the page than the screen:

[T]he entire film is stiff and unrealistic. It’s a bit of a shock to see Faulkner, a master of the narrative form, going through the motions as a bad actor in a horribly written story about his own life. But any literary fan should be fascinated by this rare glimpse of the master at home on his own little postage stamp of native soil.

Watch the rest of the film here.

One historical example:

In the early 1960s, Kim Chul was one of the foremost poets in North Korea. He was renowned for his lyric poetry and wrote often about love. The people even dubbed him “the Pushkin of Korea.” But no matter how beautiful, his poems could not be published unless they promoted Party ideology. One such poem, “A Military Jacket Button,” depicts a soldier returning home after the Korean War. He takes in his arms a motherless baby. The baby wakes up and sucks on a button on the soldier’s military uniform, mistaking it for his mother’s nipple. It is a poignant elegy about the misery of the Korean War. … [Kim Chul] depicts the Koreans as a war-weary people, and the Korean War as a tragedy for the nation. The work was considered seditious in its realism, and banned.

Paul Gallagher quotes the director on his childhood:

The first thing I can remember rebelling about really, was when I was about 8-years-old and every Sunday we’d go to church. Once a year they’d read us this pledge that we had to take for the Legion of Decency, which was the Catholic Church rating the movies—what you could see and what you couldn’t—and the condemned ones were the ones they’d tell us you’d go to Hell if you saw these movies.

Well, I remember refusing to do this pledge and my mother was kind of shocked, but I was just a child, and she didn’t make a big deal out of it. And on Sundays, the nuns would read us this list, with this voice like the Devil, and you know, seeing this nun stand there saying, “Love Is My Profession, Mom and Dad, The Naked Night.” I thought “What are these movies?” I’d never heard of them—they didn’t play at my neighborhood, believe me—but I would go and see them, or read about them, and clip the little list and keep a record of all these condemned movies. The Mom and Dad poster is hanging right in my hall—it’s still that much of an influence. But it made me want to see these movies I’d never, ever heard of. So, in fact they encouraged me, [the nuns] encouraged my interest, without ever knowing it completely.

More here. Previous Dish on Waters here and here.

For Kierkegaard, writes Julian Baggini, “to become a Christian requires a ‘leap of faith’ without the safety net of reason or evidence”:

Kierkegaard’s greatest illustration of this is his retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling (1843). Abraham is often held up as a paradigm of faith because he trusted God so much he was prepared to sacrifice his only son on his command. Kierkegaard makes us realise that Abraham acted on faith not because he obeyed a difficult order but because lifting the knife over his son defied all morality and reason. No reasonable man would have done what Abraham did. If this was a test, then surely the way to pass was to show God that you would not commit murder on command, even if that risked inviting divine wrath. If you heard God’s voice commanding you to kill, surely it would be more rational to conclude you were insane or tricked by demons than it would to follow the order. So when Abraham took his leap of faith, he took leave of reason and morality.

How insipid the modern version of faith appears in comparison. Religious apologists today might mumble about the power of faith and the limits of reason, yet they are the first to protest when it is suggested that faith and reason might be in tension. Far from seeing religious faith as a special, bold kind of trust, religious apologists are now more likely to see atheism as requiring as much faith as religion. Kierkegaard saw clearly that that faith is not a kind of epistemic Polyfilla that closes the small cracks left by reason, but a mad leap across a chasm devoid of all reason.

Dan Siedell unpacks his long fascination with modern art and connects it to his faith:

Modern art contradicts our desires. And I think that is a very good thing, given our fallen human tendency to make ourselves and our beliefs about ourselves and the world the center of the cosmos, to make ourselves the subjects of our existential sentences, to be, as David Foster Wallace said, “lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms.” And we want our visual imagery to feed our Old Adam’s desire to shape the world around our own beliefs and our own desires. To make art fit into our worldview.

But modern art lives in discontinuities. It contradicts our belief that artistic value is found in technical virtuosity, that its “meaning” should declare itself immediately, that looking is easy, and art is about making us feel good. It’s a stick shoved into the relentlessly spinning spokes of our incessantly spinning desire for emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic efficiency. In other words, modern art undermines our desire to make art serve our theologies of glory.

And it has taught me some things about my faith. Christianity is not a life system, helping me make sense of the world, making it transparent and explainable. In fact, it makes the world impenetrable, mysterious, and frustrating to me, creating discontinuities and sharp edges that confuse and anger me.

You can listen to one of his lectures on modern art, from which the above passage was taken, here.

(Image: “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, via Wikimedia Commons)

They’re mostly within the neo-Pentecostal movements, especially in the Global South. The very un-Christ-like reasons why:

Although these movements have some roots in the Pentecostalism that emerged in California in the early-twentieth century, as well as in the charismatic revivals of the 1960s and 1970s, the neo-Pentecostal churches are notable for their emphasis on a single charismatic leader and the witnessing of miraculous signs, and for teaching a strong version of the “prosperity Gospel” (the belief that financial success is the result of divine blessing).

Sociologists studying the movement – preeminently David Martin – suggest that the popularity of these churches is related to the way in which Christianity is linked to access to power. People are drawn to the neo-Pentecostal movement because they believe that their participation will result in some tangible results: financial success, health, successful marriage and so on. It is perhaps thus unsurprising that, generally speaking, individuals in less developed countries, particularly those making the transition from rural areas to large urban centers, are most likely to attend neo-Pentecostal churches.

Amidst a debate on how Christians should view the suburbs, Dreher drops an insight about living a meaningful life in ways you never romanticized about:

For a certain kind of Christian — people like me, to be blunt — the idea of living an “ordinary” life (= the life of a middle-class suburbanite) seems unattractive, at least on the surface. That could well be a sign that this is precisely the kind of life that we need for our own salvation. I read a story once about a young Orthodox man who went to a priest or an elder, I forget which, expressing a desire to be a monk. The priest apparently sensed that the young man wanted not the hard part of the monastic life, but rather was attracted by a romanticized view of monasticism. He told the young man to try his vocation by renting an apartment in a poor part of town, and try living among the poor as one of them. Pray, fast, do good works, and see how well you do. If, after a year or two of that, you find that you’re still interested in the monastic life, come back and see me.

I think there’s a lot of practical wisdom in that. I once heard of this Christian couple who were convinced they had a ministry to people working in a glamorous and exciting professional field. I didn’t know them personally, so maybe they did. But it seemed more plausible to me that they wanted to live a particularly stimulating and exotic lifestyle, but could only justify it to themselves by clothing it in a sense of mission. Hey, God needs His people in those circles too! But it’s well worth considering whether or not we’re really called to a certain life, and to a certain place, or whether we’re using God and the cause of mission to justify our preferences.

Giles Fraser is wary of euthanasia:

I do want to be a burden on my loved ones just as I want them to be a burden on me – it’s called looking after each other. Obviously, I know people are terrified of the indignity of dying and of being ill generally. Having someone wipe our bums, clean up our mess, put up with our incoherent ramblings and mood swings is a threat to our cherished sense of personal autonomy.

But this is where the liberal model of individual self-determination breaks down. For it is when we are this vulnerable that we have little choice but to allow ourselves to be loved and looked after. Lying in a bed full of our own faeces, unable to do anything about it, is when we break with the idea of René Descartes’ pernicious “I think therefore I am”.

No, we are not brains in vats. We are not solitary self-defining intellectual identities who form temporary alliances with each other for short-term mutual advantage. My existence is fundamentally bound up with yours. Of course, I will clean you up. Of course, I will hold your hand in the long hours of the night. Shut up about being a burden. I love you. This is what it means to love you. Surely, there is something extraordinarily beautiful about all of this.

Related thoughts on end-of-life care from me here and Dreher here.