We are all enmeshed in politics because we are all citizens of somewhere – even writers – and we cannot escape being shaped by political decisions, big and small. So instead of asking the question “Should literature be political?”, I would rephrase it as a statement: Literature is political because we, the creators of literature, are political animals; it is part of accepting our responsibility of being human, of being citizens of the world …
Every author has a world view which reflects a political stance and shapes what we do, even unconsciously. For example, as a child, I grew up in a world where I never saw myself or the people around me visually portrayed in the children’s books I read (though I took great pleasure in reading them). As a writer of children’s books now, I would say that I am simply concerned with telling a story that a child anywhere in the world that might want to read. But, I have to confess, I am very much concerned that the illustrations should reflect and express a multicultural world, for that is what I live in. Is that political? Can any of us escape the political? I would say no. Even romantic literature plunges us into the realm of political economy: does the potential suitor have a job?
Christianity Today got the President-elect of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Russell Moore, to write their May cover story on Christianity and hip-hop, replete the with cringe-inducing title of “W.W. Jay-Z?” Here’s the question that the article begins with (the rest is behind their paywall):
The violent edge of rap—”it’s just so angry”—is most often what I hear behind American Christians’ ambivalence about the new wave of Christian hip-hop. But not all of this ambivalence is reactionary, revealing white-bread taste. It’s a real question: Can one authentically rap the Sermon on the Mount, with its Beatitudes, warnings against anger, and meekness? No doubt one can set Matthew 5–7 to rhyme and meter, but would it still be hip-hop? If not, does that rule hip-hop out as legitimate Christian art?
To put it plainly, May’s cover story, “W.W. Jay-Z,” written by Dr. Russell Moore is an unmitigated disaster. And that’s to say nothing of the misleading — but attention-grabbing — title on the cover, “Why the Gospel Needs Hip-Hop.” It is so horrendous that, upon reading it, I knew immediately I had to respond, but I couldn’t figure out where to begin or how to go about responding.
One of Fitzgerald’s objections is that Moore neglects the history of Christian hip-hop:
Although Moore refers several times to the contemporary crop of Christian rappers as “new,” he shows no evidence that he’s aware of what was “old.” In fact, I’m not even sure after re-reading several times if he is calling the whole phenomenon of Christian rap new, or just this most recent manifestation. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he’s just saying that Lecrae and Shai Linne and Trip Lee and their ilk are the newest brand of a Christian hip-hop culture that is just about as old as hip-hop in general. But if he knows this to be true, why not mention this long lineage? How can you have a meaningful conversation about the interplay between gospel message and rap music without looking at those who have both succeeded gloriously and failed miserably before this most recent crop?
If he had any knowledge of those that came before, the question of whether or not the gospel can be communicated through rap lyrics would be moot. He could have skipped that question altogether and looked instead at the ways it has been done. If he wanted to see his bias about rap being bolstered by threat of retaliation, he could have looked at how Christian groups like Gospel Gangstaz, T-Bone, and C.M.C’s (among others), appropriated (badly, as if that wasn’t obvious) the “gangsta” style for Christ. But from there, he would have had to acknowledge that there’s not just one feeling of rap music, and as such, Christian rap groups ended up being quite diverse, particularly through what I call the golden age of Christian hip-hop, the mid- to late-90s. Good luck trying to group LA Symphony, Tunnel Rats, Grits, or Cross Movement under one general “feeling.”
[I]n our ethical lives, rules are useless. Instead we should pay attention to real people in real situations. You can find arguments for it in thinkers as diverse as Aristotle in the fourth century BC and Ludwig Wittgenstein nearly 2,500 years later. Aristotle thought of ethical judgment as a matter of discernment and fine distinctions, literally seeing a situation in all its complexity. Wittgenstein wrote of rules in his “Philosophical Investigations” that “only experienced people can apply them aright”. You can be up to your neck in rules, but they don’t in themselves tell you how to apportion blame, or to whom, or how much. For that, you need to look at what’s in front of you. If you don’t, you’re driving in the dark without headlights.
Placing practice above principle puts the burden of judgment back on us, and leaves us vulnerable to life’s obscurities and self-deceptions, to the tangle of our duties and commitments. We might aspire to clarity, but we could easily be blind. That said, it’s an idea which represents the difficulty of doing the right thing, and why would we want less than that?
A visitor to the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair observes that “the physicality of Islamic holy books is impossible to ignore”:
One of the paradoxes of the Arab world is that people will tell you there is no culture of reading, yet at the same time there is clearly huge respect for its religious and poetic heritage, as evidenced by the many beautiful editions on display. Holding a beautiful, $350 edition of Arabia’s most famous poet Al-Mutanabbi, Dar Al-Baroudi’s MD Mohammed Omeirt said: “You cannot do this with digital. This is art. You want to see. You want to touch.”
The devout of all faiths adore their books. They carry them to services, mark their most cherished passages and pass them on to the next generation. Can the same ever be said for a digital edition?
The beauty of a digital Bible for example is that I have instant access to translations that I did not even know existed and allows me to dig deeper into meaning and context that was really not possible before and all leading to a better understanding. Don’t get me wrong, I love my worn, marked up etc hard copy but it is not more or less holy than anything else I have.
Molly Crockett of University College London recently published a paper (PDF) demonstrating that altering people’s serotonin level changes how likely they are to retaliate against unfair treatment. Such research raises the possibility of a “morality pill” that would make you a better person. But would taking such a pill change the essence of who you are? Crockett talks to Joshua Knobe of Yale:
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Tony Woodlief defends the democratization of art, calling it “a striving to express the Godlikeness within oneself, which means that it is the fruit of searching and calling and finding something divine”:
The fact that wide swaths of people endeavor to create something—a poem, a photo collage, yes, even another teen paranormal sci-fi thriller novel—ought then hearten us. In these imperfect endeavors we have proof that the spark of divinity has not flickered out.
Yes, much of what we make is dreck; yes, it’s often driven by narcissism and psychosis and all manner of dysfunction. It’s twisted because we are twisted, but it still pours forth from children of God who are striving to imitate the Father, even those of us who have stopped believing in him.
Imagine that. Millions of people, many of them knowing not the first words of orthodox praise, harboring scant knowledge of theology, yet all of them whispering back to the whisper within their spirits, imitating the God they may only know, many of them, as the urge to arrange words in verse, the craving to strum a power chord with the amp cranked up high, the yearning to dance because sunlight has come pouring through the windows in a slant that overwhelms our adult insistence on having a reason for joy.
Damon Linker excoriates the reviewers who miss the deeply Christian themes and references in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, calling the film “an ecstatic cinematic tribute to God”:
That so many reviewers have either ignored Father Quintana’s role in the film, or seen his struggles as an uninteresting subplot unrelated to the movie’s exploration of romantic and sexual love, is perhaps the most stunning critical oversight of all. Just as Neil holds himself back, refusing to give in to all that love demands, Father Quintana often fails to detect the presence of God all around him and sometimes withholds himself from the most troubled and troubling people to whom he’s called to minister (including prisoners and drug addicts).
Yet unlike Neil, who ends up alone, Father Quintana achieves a spiritual epiphany during a sequence toward the end of the movie that is unlike any I have ever encountered in film, and one I have not seen referenced in a single mainstream review.
As the priest comforts a succession of suffering people — the old, the anguished, the crippled, the sick, and the dying — he recites a devotion of St. Patrick: “Christ be with me. Christ before me. Christ behind me. Christ in me. Christ beneath me. Christ above me. Christ on my right. Christ on my left. Christ in the heart.” The sequence reaches its climax with the recitation of a prayer by Cardinal Newman (one that was also prayed daily by Mother Teresa’s Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity): “Flood our souls with your spirit and life so completely that our lives may only be a reflection of yours. Shine through us. Show us how to seek you. We were made to see you.”
Humanity was made for God. And he is present all around us — in the transfiguring, wondrous joy of romantic love, in self-giving sacrifice, in our suffering and the suffering of others, in the charity we offer to those in pain, in the resplendent beauty of the natural world — if only we open our eyes to see him. That, it seems, is Terrence Malick’s scandalous message.
David Sessions grapples with how it happened to him:
Several years and some graduate school after my “deconversion,” I began to realize the story I had told myself of a systematic changing of my beliefs through argument was about as accurate as most movies that claim to be “based on true events.” In one sense, that theoretical story was true: intellectual advances I made during high school and college and after continually forced me to rethink my faith, and factual information and rational arguments played a significant role in undermining it. But my experience of the world also dramatically expanded during that time (through moves and travel), and my milieu changed significantly several times on the path from a tiny, homogenous conservative Christian town to an enormous, multicultural secular-progressive city. I experienced more places, people, art and information in a period of a few years than in my previous life combined, which shattered many of the stereotypes, prejudices and preconceived notions that made up the environment where my faith had once made sense. My “world”—in the Heideggerian sense of our “lived experience,” the non-theoretical background way things make sense to us—shifted to the extent that things I previously believed would eventually come to seem unimaginable.
But this did not happen primarily on an explicit, theoretically-engaged level; it happened “in the background,” in routines of daily life. Religious critics suggested as much—that I was sliding away from “the truth” only because of my environment, because I wanted to be “cool.” I strenuously objected that all this was, on the contrary, the product of Serious Reading and Good, Solid Intellectual Arguments. Most of us like to believe we have well-grounded, dispassionate reasons for our behavior and beliefs. But Taylor, following Heidegger, says this doesn’t really get at why we slide around the belief scale; rational explanations “give too much place to changes in belief, as against those in experience and sensibility.” My critics were correct that something else besides just theories and arguments was driving the shift. The intellectual dimension was a real, but it was pulled along by massive changes in experience, and my changing sense of what kind of person I wanted to become.
Russell D. Moore eulogizes country singer George Jones, who passed away recently, calling him “the troubadour of the Christ-haunted South”:
Some may see hypocrisy in the fact that Jones sang gospel songs. The same emotion with which he sang of drunkenness and honky-tonking, he turned to sing of “Just a Little Talk with Jesus Makes Things Right.” He often in concerts led the crowd in old gospel favorites, such as “Amazing Grace” or “I’ll Fly Away.” But I don’t think this is hypocrisy. This is not a man branding himself with two different and contradictory impulses. This was a man who sang of the horrors of sin, with a longing for a gospel he had heard and, it seemed, he hoped could deliver him. In Jones’ songs, you hear the old Baptist and Pentecostal fear that maybe, horrifically, one has passed over into the stage of Esau who, as the Bible puts it, “could not find repentance though he sought it with tears.”
Larry Rohter recalls witnessing Jones weep on his tour bus:
I don’t think he was drunk. He talked about how he was trying to stay dry for Tammy, who by that time had already re-married and divorced again. Within a year or two, he would develop a cocaine habit that would send his career off the rails, but there was no sign of that either. This was just George Jones in real life and real time.
It is hard today, in a time when irony has become a dominant cultural mode and artists are screened from reporters by phalanxes of handlers, to imagine so public a breakdown happening or a celebrity letting his pain be so visible. But Mr. Jones wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed by that display, and when he went back to the stage for a second set of what he described to me as “sad, sloppy tear-jerkers,” his singing was even more passionate and inspired, with his twangy, somewhat nasal voice cracking in all the right places with what had to be genuine feeling, not artifice.
The Dish 
