Month: December 2014

Reviewing Robinson’s new novel Lila, Linda McCullough Moore wants to see a bit more judgement from the author’s deity, claiming Robinson portrays a “God who, as far as I can tell, just wants us all to be happy, if not in this life, then certainly in the next”:

I venture to suggest that Lila is a polemic, and a brilliant one. If we engage the novel at this level, surely it is at Robinson’s express instigation. No matter that the art is heavenly; no child could mistake the conclusions: The Conclusion, Eternal Glory for us all. No questions asked. But also, no questions answered. Are we to be faulted for scratching our heads about this sermon later on a Sunday afternoon? Puzzling out where any God of Holy Writ might recognize himself in the story that she is telling?

Lila’s favorite book in the Bible is Ezekiel, written by the same prophet who says God will separate the sheep from the sheep, a far finer distinction even than the sheep from the goats. But Robinson is having none of it. We’re all just doing the best we can with what we’ve got. Some readers ask what kind of preacher is John Ames. We can only surmise, but we do know what kind of preacher is Marilynne Robinson. Convincing, in a word. Her nonfiction makes a reader think. Her fiction converts the heart. In Robinson there is a balm in Gilead, and it is surely sweet. I’m just not sure where it comes from.

Robinson writes that much is mystery, even as she is spelling out without confusion the ways of eternity and holiness and judgment. She claims the unknowable, even as she specifies God’s ways to man and womankind.

Gracy Olmstead rises to Robinson’s defense:

First, many of the quotes pulled from [McCullough Moore’s] review are Lila’s internal thought processes, as she grapples with the fear that many of those she once knew and loved will not be saved. Thus, these thoughts are not declarative truth statements being made by Robinson. They are all in the voice of Lila, who, as she reads Scripture, wrestles mightily with these questions. They aren’t meant as Robinson’s Gospel: they’re Lila’s still-being-formed-and-sanctified conceptions of the Gospel.

Second: Robinson here is writing to people from Lila’s world, and that is one of the reasons I appreciate this novel so deeply. Gilead was a lofty, lovely book, full of the wizened thoughts of a preacher. In it, Ames struggles with conceptions of grace and redemption, but he does so from a position of wisdom and maturity. Lila presents something different: a soul-grappling that is very raw, intimate, and personal. Moore, in her review, quotes a particular passage by Ames, in which he says, “If the Lord is more gracious than any of us can begin to imagine … then your Doll … is safe, and warm, and happy.” It may sound heretical or evil to some, but really, I think it’s a deeply important statement. Ames is noting that we are fallible humans, and God is mysterious. We do not know the heart of man, nor do we know the plan of God in its entirety. Salvation and redemption are not ours to give, nor are they ours to judge. And so Ames offers this truth to Lila—that God is good, more gracious and loving than the human mind can ever conceive or imagine. And he invites her to rest in that truth, using words that she will understand.

Previous Dish on Robinson and Lila here and here.

A reader “couldn’t agree more” that the nativity scene shouldn’t look so clean and pristine:

This is one reason the [above] image has always been a favorite of mine among nativity scenes. It’s from the early 1400s, by the early Northern Renaissance painter known as the Master of Flémalle. Just take a look at how scrawny, sickly, and unappealing that barn-born infant is, lying there in the dirt!

But another notes:

The virgin birth includes a lot of theology (which might be speculative) that it wasn’t as ugly or messy as women who aren’t virgin nor immaculately conceived.

That said, the Manger scenes are usually too clean (it wasn’t in a barn, it was a cave!).  The stoic and pure (carrying an easter lily) Joseph?  There was an umbilical cord and placenta – I haven’t read anything saying he was born without these.

We seem to confuse flashiness and gaudy scenes with celebration.  Christmas should be a humble holiday.  Joyful, but solemn.  Like the birth of Jesus. Mary had many sorrows, the birth of her son was not one of them, even in the process.

Another notes regarding the representative nativity scene we posted:

Perhaps they could start with a family that looks more fitting a Middle East setting than a white upper-class family from Stockholm.

Another adds:

The manger would also be full of animal shit as well.  It was a stable, not a hayride.

Speaking of shit:

For more realism in nativity scenes, go to Catalonia, where any self-respecting nativity scene features a “caganer,” which is traditionally a shepherd taking a dump behind the manger. These days, of course, pretty much any public figure of any renown has a caganer made in his honor:

Previous Dish on caganers and the caga tió, or shitting log, here and here.

Morten Høi Jensen surveys a number of recent books on the origins of modern atheism, finding in Nick Spencer’s Atheists: The Origins of the Species the intriguing argument that atheism’s rise was due to “thinkers who wanted to realign the relationship between religion and society,” rather than outright claims that God did not exist:

One of the ironies of Spencer’s narrative, and what gives it a kind of provocative counterintuitiveness, is his insistence on the role of believers themselves in the undermining of their faith. When believers splintered into factions and began questioning each other’s authority, Spencer writes, “they also questioned the texts on which their interpretation was founded, and biblical criticism as an anti-Christian discipline was born.”

In other words, atheism, like a teenage boyfriend, was snuck in through the back door while devout parents were distractedly bickering over biblical interpretation. And once the initial transgression had occurred, religious authority’s undoing was irreversible. Slowly, historians, philosophers, and scientists began to vie with church authorities for the definitive account of human origin and destiny. Even the publication of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), with its claim that, as Spencer puts it, “history was all humanity and accident and irony,” was considered by many to be a subversion of the notions of divine providence. There was no divine intervention in Gibbon’s history, just imperfect human agency.

Spencer finds a parallel argument in Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God:

The English literary theorist Terry Eagleton joins Spencer in seeing the history of atheism not strictly as a refutation of God but as a series of disagreements over moral and political authority. “The Enlightenment,” he writes early in Culture and the Death of God, “may have been troubled by the question of faith, but it was not especially anti-religious.” The philosophes of the Enlightenment viewed religion in practical, utilitarian terms; it was to be contested when it supported political autocracy but tolerated when it promoted civic virtue. Whatever their own hang-ups about religion, these largely bourgeois intellectuals looked kindly (and not a little condescendingly) on the lower classes clinging desperately to their pious ideology. What harm is a little superstition, the philosophes rationalized, if it guarantees social cohesion?

But Eagleton sees it as “imprudent for the rulers to worship Reason while the masses pay homage to the Virgin Mary,” and his book is partly a critique of those who would use religion as a rationale for an existing social order. Thus he examines the variously philosophical and political attempts to replace religious eschatology with what he calls counterfeit theology. “The history of the modern age,” he argues,

is among other things the search for a viceroy for God. Reason, Nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, the life force and personal relations: all of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity.

Recent Dish on the origins of atheism here and here.

http://youtu.be/_qt435yF2Qg

John Coltrane’s brilliant jazz album of that name was released fifty years ago this month. S. Brent Plate reflects on its spiritual qualities:

What is it about Coltrane, and in particular A Love Supreme, that gets some of us going spiritually? Coltrane was after truth, as one biographer put it, and not necessarily “pleasant listening.” I am attracted to this idea, that truth is difficult and can not easily be possessed. The corollary here is that there is no truth in Musak, and not much in the pop charts. In classical terms “truth” and “beauty” are not interchangeable.

Perhaps more importantly, truth is heard. It is an activity of the ears. And these are not necessarily the sounds of words being spoken, but a sensual experience that operate above and beyond the conceptual, intellectual realm. Truth is in the sensual arts, not rational philosophy.

True, Coltrane wrote some unapologetically religious words for the liner notes of A Love Supreme, giving “all praise to God,” and thanking God for his “spiritual awakening” of 1957 which, as we know from his biography, had also to do with his quitting heroin and alcohol. (Even so, the abuses had already been enough that he died of liver failure at age 40.) But who can resist putting the liner notes down quickly and sitting and listening: “Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm,” making up the four parts of the musical journey.

Hisham Aidi, however, finds the album reflects an interest in Islam:

The conventional view is that by 1964, Coltrane had moved away from his Methodist upbringing, adopting a “pan-religious” outlook with a particular interest in Eastern mysticism. In spite of that, “A Love Supreme” is still described as laden with Biblical symbolism: the title “Psalm”, and the rising cadences, reminiscent of black preachers’ style, are offered as evidence that Coltrane was still rooted in Christianity. But ask one of the jazzmen or Muslim elders who knew Coltrane, and you get a different answer.

The saxophonist Yusef Lateef, who died at the age of 93 earlier this year, worked closely with Coltrane between 1963 and 1966. In his autobiography , “A Gentle Giant”, Lateef says: “The prayer that John wrote in ‘A Love Supreme’ repeats the phrase ‘All praise belongs to God no matter what’ several times. This phrase has the semantics of the al-Fatiha, which is the first chapter or sura of the Holy Quran. The Arabic transliteration is ‘al-Humdulilah…’ Since all faithful Muslims say the al-Fatiha five times a day or more, it is reasonable to assume that John heard this phrase from [his Muslim wife] Sister Naima many times.”

Lateef is referring to the poem Coltrane wrote and included in the liner notes of the album. Coltrane wrote: “No matter what … It is with God. He is gracious and merciful” and ends with “All praise to God…” What Lateef and others have noted is that “gracious and merciful” is a translation of “rahman raheem”, the opening lines of the Fatiha. Moreover, say the elders, when Coltrane begins chanting the album’s title for half a minute it sounds like a Sufi breathily repeating “Allah supreme”.