October 2013 – Page 16

A Front Row Seat In Hell

Timothy George considers the cottage industry of “Hell Houses” – theatrical productions of the underworld designed to terrify congregations into remaining chaste and faithful:

There are many variations on this theme: a hayride through hell, a demon-guided stroll in a cemetery, a train trip of terror, and so on—but all presentations have three things in common. First, there is a series of mini-dramas, gruesome, death-centered tableaux always presented in lurid, edgy (some say cheesy), soap-opera style. These run the gamut from smoking-related cancer deaths to school shootings, teen suicides, fiery car crashes, botched abortions, homosexual teens dying of AIDS, and all kinds of family traumas—domestic violence, divorce, sex abuse (including incest), and the like. The aim of the skit is to show the truth of the New Testament dictum, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23), not only physical death in this world, but also eternal punishment in hell in the next.

After the “incidents” come the consequences, namely, a visit to hell. “Hell” is a dark, smoke-filled room complete with strobe lights and the shrieks of tortured souls. The dénouement is a Mel Gibson-esque portrayal of the crucifixion followed by a personal appeal to accept Jesus Christ. Sometimes an actor impersonating Jesus makes the appeal himself in a breath-minted, nose-to-nose encounter with those presumably shaken by what they have seen.

The demand has grown since Jerry Falwell pioneered the idea in the 1970s:

Colorado-based Keenan Roberts has led the way with his publication of a how-to kit for pastors and youth ministers who want to put a little scare-mongering into their teen evangelism program. For several hundred dollars you can buy this resource with directions on how to construct an effective Hell House. There are scripts for seven rooms and instruction on how to present a graphic hell scene and a closing “come to Jesus” scenario. If you want some help putting on a sizzling evangelism event this Halloween, then Roberts’ Hell House Outreach Kit just might be what you are looking for! This kit, available in all fifty states and twenty-six countries around the world, is sold to church leaders who want to “get prayed up and powered up” and “prepared for the ride” of their ministry life. The kit comes with this admonition: Shake your city with the most “in-your-face, high-flyin’, no denyin’, death-defyin’, Satan-be-cryin’, keep-ya-from-fryin’, theatrical stylin’, no holds barred, cutting-edge” evangelism tool of the new millennium!

“A Signpost In These Strange Times”

Reading Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer alongside Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, Will Di Novi finds the book fitting for our own downbeat era:

[The novel’s protagonist] Binx Bolling is at first glance an unusual poster boy for the current depression, an era in which the quest for self-realization might seem an unaffordable luxury. But the search for meaning has never ebbed and flowed according to the fluctuations of the stock market. Millions of Americans led interior, profoundly solitary lives during the bubble years that started the twenty-first century, and they now confront even more acute feelings of dislocation. Binx is a soulful and profane standard-bearer for that disillusionment, “smelling merde from every quarter” of American life. He fails in his half-hearted love affairs. He confounds his family with his disregard for rectitude and tradition. Alienated from both the Old South and the New America, Binx staggers towards the same sobering realization that dogged Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1979. ”We’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning,” Carter preached in his speech. “We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

His concluding thoughts on the novel’s enduring lessons:

“Whenever there is a chance of gain there is also a chance of loss,” Binx declares in the frenzied aftermath of a car crash. “Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.” There’s something strangely comforting about Binx’s equanimity, his stoicism in the face of forces beyond his control. Like Binx and his Mad Men contemporaries, unaware of the assassinations and race riots and terrifying hairstyles lurking just around the corner, we have no idea what will emerge out of the seismic changes convulsing our national governments and our global economy. Consider The Moviegoer a signpost in these strange times, a beacon lit by the eternal flames of Percy’s imagination: the alienation and despair that persist in times of plenty and paucity alike; the power of language and humor to still these tremors and give them meaning. The malaise will endure, he warns us. The search will continue.

Popenomics

Reviewing Papal Economics by Maciej Zieba, Michael P. Orsi surveys the economic philosophy of pontiffs through history up to recent times:

[Author Maciej] Zieba shows how John Paul II believed that democracy and capitalism were good for the human person. Having come out of a socialist state, the Pope recognized the dehumanizing effect that an un-free political system has on personal creativity and the creation of wealth. The Pope, he claims, in no way promoted a “third way” redistributionist economic system. He rather held to the “ordoliberal” principles, perfected in post-World-War II Germany. Ordoliberals maintain that the role of the state is to establish the rules for a real free market in which capitalism and free competition can cooperate for the common good. …

Yet John Paul was no libertarian, as Zieba explains: “The libertarian approach to the right of private property, through theoretically not an absolute right, is in practice free of social and moral obligations.” Instead, Catholic social teaching calls for the state to make available to all its citizens the bounty of the earth which may be attained through work. In Laborem Exercens, the Pope says humans express themselves in their work. In no way does the Pope call for a welfare state, but he does ask that governments help to provide opportunities for their citizens to earn a decent living. To this end he urges just laws, a fair economic system, sensitivity to and the protection of the rights of minorities, and aid for those who fall below the poverty level.

Meanwhile, the current Pope is doing his best to put his own house in order:

The pontiff may be ostentatiously cutting back, but not without a fight. The Catholic church has a long history of extravagance, and sometimes the old ways are slow to die. Though Pope Francis started off by setting new simple sartorial standards, when it comes to throwing out real estate the Vatican elite may prove more resistant. There is a story doing the Vatican gossip rounds of a cardinal turning up in a church to celebrate mass and being offered a splendid red cappa magna to wear. A cappa magna is the liturgical equivalent of an opera cape – all billowing watered silk and a train that would rival Princess Diana’s wedding dress. The cardinal refused, saying: “I sold mine after the second Vatican council, and gave the money to the poor.” The master of ceremonies gave the curt reply: “It’s a shame you didn’t sell one of your two villas, and give the proceeds from that to the poor.”

It may be just a story, but it expresses the feeling of double standards within the Vatican community over self-conscious economy. The current German row, perhaps a Vatican “duck house” moment, is worth considering in the context of the power play between the Vatican and the German wing of the Catholic church. The independent wealth of the German church comes from the state – it is tax funded. In 2012 the Catholic church in Germany took $7.1bn in tax revenue, from the country’s 23 million declared Catholics who by law pay 8-10% of their income to the church. The autocratic nature of the Vatican means that even if a bishop can clearly afford it, if it doesn’t wash with His Holiness’s vision you run the risk of being defrocked.

Previous Dish on Francis’s and Benedict’s views on economics here and here.

Face Of The Day

WISH, pictured above, is artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada‘s 11-acre portrait of an anonymous Belfast girl:

Several years in the making, WISH was first plotted on a grid using state-of-the-art Topcon GPS technology and 30,000 manually placed wooden stakes in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter. The portrait was then “drawn” with aid of volunteers who helped place nearly 8 million pounds of natural materials including soil, sand, and rock over a period of four weeks. Rodríguez-Gerada says of the endeavor:

Working at very large scales becomes a personal challenge but it also allows me to bring attention to important social issues, the size of the piece is intrinsic to the value of its message. Creativity is always applied in order to define an intervention made only with local materials, with no environmental impact, that works in harmony with the location.

(Image by Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, who is currently exhibiting “Texture Urbaine” at Mathgoth Gallery in Paris until November 9th, 2013)

Predestined To Suffer

Ruminating on the religious themes in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Gene Fant finds the southern novelist “a very peculiar kind of Calvinist”:

He believed in total depravity and his novels explore original sin in all of its amazing variety. Unfortunately, he also seems to have believed that the atonement was limited, but so much so that no one was able to access it. My sense is that for him, God was a cruel judge who set up the rules, rigged the universe to punish fallen humankind, and then left us with a taunting glimmer of redemption, a risen Savior who has elected no one. It’s an amazing perversion of the Doctrine of Election to imagine an entire world that has realized that it has not been chosen to receive grace. If Faulkner is the creator god of his literary world, then certainly he himself is a cruel deity. …

Because there is no transcendent salvation possible, the best we can hope for is dignified endurance of suffering. Addie [Bundren] views her suffering as a sort of moral accounting of her sins. Faulkner himself noted that Dilsey, one of the primary narrators of The Sound and the Fury, was an ideal because she and her family “endured.” Suffering may not be redemptive, but it is character proving. Of course, proven character is a thin substitute for eternal redemption.

Experimental musician Tim Hecker collaborated with Sabrina Ratté on the above music video, which draws on found footage documenting the “Botafumeiro” in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. From an interview with Ratté:

Did your choice of the Botafumeiro footage depend mostly on the aesthetics of the footage, or does it also signify something religious, spiritual, mystical, or otherwise?

I personally appreciated the formal aspect of the original video. As I was working with the footage, I enjoyed the organic and hypnotic rhythm of it, the soft light coming from the windows and the architectural glimpses we get of the cathedral. The smoke of the burned incense was the inspiration to use the video feedback technique. It has the same kind of fluid movements, and both seem to dematerialize matter and transform it into some kind of entity free from the constraints of gravity… I was also interested by the rawness of the footage, the unstable camera movements creating interesting accidents. There is absolutely no message behind this video.

Friendship At First Sight

Ann Friedman believes in not just choosing your friends, but actively courting them:

[M]ost of our courtship narratives are still romantic, which really tends to obscure the importance of friendship’s early stages, and downplay the thought and skill that goes into cultivating meaningful platonic relationships. We tend to second-guess ourselves when we feel that jolt of friend attraction.

A woman I know who recently moved from Houston to Los Angeles was telling me about a woman she met and really wanted to befriend.

“It seems like she has so many friends already though,” said the new girl in town. “Do you think she’d mind if I asked her to hang out?” “You have to ask her!” I said. I have heard many women describe the first time they met a friend and just knew they were destined for years of inside jokes and hang times on the couch and late-night party antics.

“Nearly all friendships are based on a spark of mutual attraction. Some people describe platonic love-at-first-sight stories, wherein they were instantly drawn to a new acquaintance and just knew they would befriend her,” says Carlin Flora, author of Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are. Still, she says, “We often drift into friendships, especially when we’re young and in a work or school setting that makes it easy to automatically ramp things up without having to make a concerted effort to develop the friendship. The main point of my book is that we should be more conscious of how and whom we befriend, since these people have a huge impact on our life trajectories.”

“My Unconquerable Soul”

Sonia Tsuruoka analyzes William Ernest Henley’s famous poem “Invictus.” Originally written about Henley’s battle with tuberculosis, the poem now serves as “something of an intellectual heirloom for activists beating back the tides of institutionalized oppression”:

“Invictus” isn’t a political poem in the usual sense: it’s meditative rather than militant, assuming the quietness of a prayer rather than the pomp and circumstance of a battle cry. Even more remarkable is the sense that its rhymed quatrains comprise much more than an effortless execution of form, conveying a host of revolutionary philosophical implications. In particular, the lines “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul,” remind us of Henley’s outspoken — and highly controversial — atheism, which remain a source of individual empowerment in a “place of wrath and tears.” Likewise, “whatever gods may be” are rendered obsolete by the poem’s progressive notions of self-determinism, in what should be interpreted as the triumph of human resilience unaided by divine benevolence.

Henley avoids the usual discourse on order and disorder, instead finding an exhilarating freedom in the absence of divine control, not to mention the kind of empowerment one might expect to derive from godlessness. Fate, in this case remains undecided rather than assigned, a series of events governed by free will and its lifelong struggle against the “fell clutch of circumstance.” Henley’s frightening, if awe-inspiring, revelation that no one can or will write our destiny for us explains “Invictus’” unrivaled popularity in political circles — for how else should political activists understand themselves if not as writers of their own history? No wonder innumerable modern revolutionaries, including Burmese opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, have cited Henley’s 19th century poem as a “great unifier that knows no frontiers of space or time,” a heartfelt iteration of “struggle and suffering, the bloody unbowed head, and even death, all for the sake of freedom.”

Ordinary Deaths

James Poniewozik was blown away (paywalled) by Time Of Death, a new documentary series from Showtime:

Death on TV is not exactly rare. AMC’s guts-spattered zombie series The Walking Dead drew over 20 million viewers for its Season 4 premiere. Shootings and serial killers abound. Life is cheap on TV, or rather death is–it’s plentiful, showy, devoid of realism or consequence. But ordinary death is a blank spot in our pop memory, one we’ve filled with monsters and explosions. After a steady diet of Hollywood deaths, real ones–the labored breathing, the body becoming a slack husk–seem uncanny, alien.

In a later post, he focuses on an individual’s story:

One of the subjects who volunteered for Time of Death was Lenore Lefer, a 75-year-old therapist with pancreatic cancer, who in her professional life specialized in grief counseling for survivors. She wanted to do the series, she said, because we live in a culture that denies and avoids death. (The producers—the Magical Elves group, better known for reality shows like Top Chef—give participants a lot of space to talk about the filming itself, and stop the cameras when they request it. Lenore herself asked that cameras not be present at the moment of her death, to give space to her family.)

I think she’s right, and I suspect we’d plan for and deal with death better if we weren’t so good at avoiding it. But watching Time of Death also gave me a greater appreciation for all the entertainments we’ve developed to displace our fear of death. At one point during my binge-watch of the six episodes, I took a break to watch a screener of The Walking Dead, and its over-the-top gory re-killings were a strange kind of relief; never had I appreciated phony Hollywood death so much. (I wonder, in fact, if people who work around death for a living—nurses or hospice-care workers, say—need a similar kind of escape.)

Month: October 2013