Month: April 2014

This Lenten season, Carolyn Browender made “the commitment to pray every day,” a spiritual practice she admits can be a struggle. To guide her efforts, she’s turning to different faith traditions – spending a week with each one – beginning with Mormonism:

To say that Mormon prayer was a shift from my usual practice is an understatement. Instead of praying all curled up in my cozy flannel sheets, I prayed on my knees next to my bed both in the morning and at night. I was not raised in a church that had the congregation kneel for prayer. When I attend services where this happens, I opt to remain seated with my head bowed and hands folded. This past week was the first time I knelt in prayer consistently, and I was surprised at how much of a difference it made. The physical shift from my bed to the floor facilitated a mental and spiritual shift. It was easier to focus solely on prayer because I kneeled specifically for that purpose, though admittedly I did a much better job with this at night.

Another practice that focused my mind on prayer was saying the prayers out loud. This isn’t required for every time you pray, but the church guide says “we should make an extra effort at times to pray vocally.” The only times I pray out loud are when I’m participating in a congregational prayer or mentioning a concern in a bidding prayer, so this felt foreign to me. It also made me feel quite vulnerable, as I often pray about what is causing stress or pain in my life. That said, I also felt like my prayers for others were more heartfelt. There’s something about naming a person or group of people that seems to pack more of a spiritual punch than merely thinking of them.

The next week, she followed the Quaker way of prayer – and was again challenged by the transition:

The best prayer guidance I was able to find was something about some Friends telling people that they would “hold them in the light.” Basically, the Quaker version of “I’ll pray for you/be thinking of you.” I liked this phrase. It seemed like a respectable hybrid between offering thoughts or prayers, though I could see someone giving me a weird look if I uttered the phrase out loud. But when I actually tried to do this it felt like I was mentally setting the people I was praying for on fire. Yes, I visualized these folks amidst a sea of yellow-orange light. I blame the transition from the formality and specificity of Mormon prayer protocol for this error. I was used to following very clear, literal directions about the right way to communicate with God. Quaker prayer is quite different. …

I … discovered later in the week (thanks to some readings referred to me by @LondonQuakers via @RobertaWedge) that for many Friends, prayer isn’t something that you do once or twice a day, as I am used to, but a constant awareness and awe of the holiness around you. To be sure, I’d come across this idea in some of the research I did earlier, but I was too focused on finding a specific set of praying instructions to realize this.

(Photo by Vinoth Chandar)

For an overview of Jody Bottum’s new book, An Anxious Age, check out Bottum’s lecture at AEI. In it, he argues that “our purely political concerns have been reduced to nothing more than footballs with which we happen to play that public game of spiritual redemption”:

The major event that allowed this spiritualizing of our politics is the utter collapse of the Protestant mainline churches, those once central and stabilizing institutions in the American experiment. With their collapse, since the 1970s, strange entities have broken loose to find a new home in politics. There’s a reason far too many Americans think their opponents are evil. Politics has become a supernatural battleground, where we want to work out not our political problems, but our spiritual anxieties.

The disappearance of the Protestant ascendancy that defined the American new world for 300 years is a cause of enormous amounts of our current political situation, of our incivility toward one another, and of our politics of salvation.

Last weekend we featured laudatory reviews of Buttum’s book. Greg Forster wasn’t as impressed, describing it as “a bad book with a good book trapped inside it, struggling to get out.” He particularly laments its “cartoon caricature” of Protestantism:

Bottum’s sneers at evangelicalism arise from a deeper contempt for Protestant religion as such.

Having uncritically assimilated Max Weber’s long-discredited account of Protestant theology and sociology, Bottum sees the religious anxiety of the social gospel movement as a natural product of Protestant religion. Thus, the current downfall of American culture is merely the necessary historical consequence of Protestantism.

As Bottum’s own evidence shows, the social gospel did not develop religious anxiety and hand it down to today’s secularism because it was following the natural direction of Protestant religion. Bottum describes, complete with damning original source quotations, how social gospel theology denied the power of the cross to save anyone. Yet he never explains why he doesn’t accept what would seem to be the theory best supported by these facts—namely, that the social gospel created religious anxiety precisely because it abandoned Protestant religion.

If Bottum made a serious case against Protestantism, providing argument and evidence, his book would be worth taking seriously. But Bottum is no Brad Gregory. He is simply tossing around unexamined prejudices.

Geoffrey Kabaservice picks up on the pessimism of Bottum’s book:

The American experiment, in Bottum’s telling, has always rested on the three-legged stool of democracy, capitalism, and religion. Throughout most of the country’s history, these three legs both “accommodated one another and, at the same time, pushed hard against one another.” At times, the force of democracy pushed back against overweening religion, as with the immigrant-led populism that halted anti-Catholic oppression in the nineteenth century. At other times, religion used its prophetic force to call democracy to account, as with the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Bottum worries that with the collapse of Mainline Protestantism, much of what we value about America may not survive in the future, leaving us with either a rapacious consumer society or a nanny state. He also warns that liberalism itself may be undermined by the disappearance of religion from the public square; liberalism is based on religiously derived ideas of human dignity, and “every attempt to anchor human dignity in something other than biblical religion has failed.” …

Time will tell if Bottum’s more pessimistic conclusions will bear out. In the meantime, this book drives home what we have lost, as a culture, with the death of Mainline Protestantism, and the ways in which religion continues, in one form or another, to shape our American present.

 

 

Today marks the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death. Tom Slater insists that “try as we might, it’s impossible to separate the man from his music”:

Cobain was widely hailed as the last great rock icon – someone whose life, work and time coalesced to form one totemic legend. Any claim that pop music, in and of itself, can attain some level of immortality, as if, like the great works of antiquity, we can easily separate the work from the man and the myth, is ludicrous. Popular culture is always intertwined with the conditions, and often the person, that helped create it and make it cool. The question, two decades on, is what do we make of it all; of Nirvana, Generation X and Cobain himself.

In an angst-ridden satirical essay, Zachary Lipez offers advice to writers looking to mark the occasion as “an excellent opportunity to write about what Kurt Cobain meant to you.” Josh Jones criticizes some recent commemorations of Cobain, particularly grimacing at the media’s “cultish fascination with newly-released police photos of [his] death scene”:

Atrocious though such coverage may be, there’s good reason beyond nostalgia, hero-worship, or sick fascination to revisit Cobain’s legacy. On April 10, Michael Stipe will induct Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, formally enshrining the once scruffy outsiders in the hallowed company of ultimate rock insider-dom. This gesture might make some people (maybe it’s just me) feel a little conflicted. After all, wasn’t it precisely the grandiose, popular-kid culture of halls of fame that drove Cobain to the margins, where he did his best work, and ultimately drove him to hate what he’d become—a star? In his strange suicide note, we see Cobain beating himself up for being unable to live up to the hype—unable, as he put it, to be a “Freddy Mercury” and “relish in the love and adoration from the crowd.” There’s something, perhaps, almost tragically insensitive, however well-intentioned, in posthumously turning Kurt Cobain into Elvis.

Two days after his body was found, thousands of fans met to mourn at a candlelight vigil in Seattle, where they heard a recording of Courtney Love reading her husband’s suicide note (a note that sparked the Dish’s long-running thread on suicide):

Anyone can now read Cobain’s suicide note. Google showcases a series of image files, JPEGs tinted in different shades of scanner. Some have been rendered artistically with superimposed images of Cobain’s face, or the less tactful splattering of digitally generated blood. If you prefer, you can read the note in print in several Cobain biographies or his published journals. You can study the directions his handwriting slants and the cross-outs and the font size. You can read it over and over, thinking that you are in that moment and might be able to stop what’s coming before you finish.

But in 1994, two days after his body was found, there was no search engine waiting to share the most private moment of his life. There was only his wife, who–like him–understood that generation and foresaw the sea change his death would cause. By reading the note, she offered them access to all of the incomplete answers–that he was overwhelmed by a lack of passion for writing and playing music, that he felt guilty about that emptiness, that he believed himself to be infantile, narcissistic, too sensitive, unappreciative, erratic, hateful. The note was not vengeful; it was hopeless and apologetic. She delivered it with periodically dispersed commentary, as though reading aloud a harsh break-up note she’d found shoved into the slats of her locker. But she also cried, and her sobs were genuine and resonant. Her uninhibited grief transformed his death into something messy and visceral and selfish and ultimately public, offering the several thousand impressionable young adults in Seattle Center the opportunity to identify with her pain, not his.

Jillian Mapes pays tribute to Cobain with a thoughtful round-up of articles, interviews, and photographs. She highlights David Fricke’s January 1994 Rolling Stone cover story on Cobain, in which he spoke candidly about pain and suicide:

Have you ever been that consumed with distress or pain or rage that you actually wanted to kill yourself?

For five years during the time I had my stomach problem, yeah. I wanted to kill myself every day. I came very close many times. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it. It was to the point where I was on tour, lying on the floor, vomiting air because I couldn’t hold down water. And then I had to play a show in 20 minutes. I would sing and cough up blood.

This is no way to live a life. I love to play music, but something was not right. So I decided to medicate myself.

Even as satire, though, a song like that [“I Hate Myself And I Want To Die”] can hit a nerve. There are plenty of kids out there who, for whatever reasons, really do feel suicidal.

That pretty much defines our band. It’s both those contradictions. It’s satirical, and it’s serious at the same time.

Alan Light contemplates how Nirvana affected the music industry:

In the wake of Nirvana’s success, the low-wattage radio stations and Xeroxed fanzines of the “college rock” scene were transformed into a marketing monolith known as “alternative culture”. Seattle’s thrift-store anti-fashion took over couture runways and mall stores. Nirvana, like Woodstock, marked both the pinnacle and the end of an underground movement – the moment that Madison Avenue witnessed the scale of a new audience and pounced. This commodification was a big part of what tormented Cobain in his final years, but ultimately it’s neither good nor bad – it’s just what happens when culture meets capitalism…. So, yes, Nirvana changed the world, at least for a moment.

(Video: Cobain performs “Come As You Are” in a rehearsal for MTV Unplugged, November 1993)

Zhana Vrangalova notes new research:

A study just published in the Journal of Bisexuality provides at least a partial answer about interest in specific types of threesome. Researchers Heather Armstrong and Elke Reissing of the University of Ottawa were interested in heterosexual adults’ attitudes toward dating and hooking up with bisexual partners of the opposite sex. They asked 720 participants (a mix of Canadian undergraduates and non-students, ranging from 18 to 60 years old with a mean age of 21) about their interest in a threesome with two partners of the opposite sex across three different relationship scenarios—casual sex; dating; and committed relationship.

As you can see in the graph below, regardless of the proposed relationship type, very few women showed interest in having a threesome with two men if given the opportunity. On a scale of 0 (completely disagree) to 6 (completely agree), women’s desire for an MFM (male-female-male) threesome barely surpassed 1 in the “best case” scenario—casual sex.

Men’s desires told a different story.

In the casual-sex context, men leapt at the opportunity to have a threesome with two women, their desires far surpassing the midpoint of the scale. Although this desire was lower for more involved relationship categories, men’s interest in an FMF (female-male-female) threesome still hovered at or slightly below the mid-point of the scale for both dating and committed relationship partners.

The results were similar when participants were asked how arousing they found the idea or fantasy of having a threesome with two opposite-sex partners: Women’s average score (across all three relationship categories) was a meager 1.62 on the same 0-6 scale; the men’s average was a whopping 4.48. This gender difference was statistically significant and quite large (for any stats geeks out there: Cohen d’s was = 1.50).

Finally, only 2 percent of women said they’d already had an MFM (and all had reported only having one such experience); by comparison, a full 10 percent of men said they’d had an FMF (and half of them reported having had more than one such experience, with a few reporting up to 20).

A big caveat:

Of course, this survey doesn’t give us a complete picture of people’s interest in threesomes—women were not asked about an FMF scenario, for example, and men were not asked about a MFM scenario. The gender difference might be much smaller, nonexistent, or even reversed, as anecdotal evidence suggests both women and men are more interested in a threesome with two women than with two men.

Laura Miller reviews Tony Dokoupil’s memoir about his father, who smuggled marijuana into the US during the ’70s and ’80s:

The pot Americans smoke today is almost entirely homegrown, sleekly and cleanly bred and raised. By contrast, “my father’s pot was dirty: doused in ocean spray, soaked in fuel, infested with spiders.” But for decades, the heyday of Dokoupil’s father and his cronies, smuggled dope was the only — or at least the best — game in town. Dokoupil offers a history of the American marijuana trade during those years, when smugglers were celebrated as daring counterculture heroes by magazines like High Times, men and women who put their freedom and occasionally their lives at risk to help their fellow freaks get high. Well, and also to make a buck — lots and lots of bucks. For a while, during the Carter administration, decriminalization advanced and legalization seemed imminent, but then Ronald Reagan and his gaunt, piously anti-drug wife took the White House and turned up the heat again with their war on drugs.

In a recent interview, Dokoupil elaborated on what motivated his father to move illegal drugs:

In the late 1970s, 90 percent of the marijuana was coming into Florida. It was primarily Colombian; some of it was Jamaican. My father’s weed would be delivered to an old fishing shack in the [Florida] Keys. … It’s only one road that connects that necklace of islands and everyone knew that that was the road on which marijuana was smuggled into the country. So to smuggle on that road took an incredible amount of tolerance for risk.

So my father, despite being a partner in the operation, volunteered, for $25,000 a shot, to drive Winnebagos of weed out of the Keys and into America, just for the sheer thrill of it. He had no financial reason to do it. He had no operational reason to do it. … But by then he was addicted to the sensation of it, to the risk.