Author: Matthew Sitman

by Matthew Sitman

A couple months back, a Reddit user spotted the above pamphlet from a Christian organization, replete with garbled texts that make it seem like Jesus didn’t have time for the person he was messaging. The episode prompts Billy Kangas to lament evangelicals’ “groan worthy” attempts at making Christianity cool and relevant, arguing that when “the Church employs superficial symbols to communicate the Gospel, the Gospel can only take hold of people on a superficial level”:

A slogan-branded faith can’t communicate the depth of the mystery of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Perhaps this is part of the reasons there has been such a mass exodus of evangelical children after they graduate from youth group.

Historical Christian symbols, on the other hand, are primordial and polyvalent:

Flesh, blood, light, water, birth, death, eating, drinking, hunger and thirst. These symbols are not seeking to emulate the ephemeral but they encompass our entire existence. The symbols not only contain a wealth of meaning, they contain us. They dig deep into who we are as people in our deepest depths, in our hopes and fears. They are the building blocks of poetry, romance and drama. They have layers of meaning and depths that require a lifetime to divulge. They captivate rather than entertain. In many places these images have been lost, and I believe they need to be reclaimed.

One alternative he suggests Christians cultivate – “create space for silence”:

It’s no secret that we live in a noisy world. Part of the reason the creating of a pop-culture Jesus is so tempting is because many in the Church realize that they are competing for the attention of people who are constantly bombarded with images and sounds designed to overwhelm the senses. The fact that there is rarely a moment of stillness in our lives means that we rarely give images and symbols the space they need to settle deeply within us.

(Image via Imgur/theqwoppingdead)

by Matt Sitman

In a lengthy critique of psychologist Barbara Fredricksen’s Positivity – including news that a recent study found serious problems with the math underlying her work – Will Wilkinson hones in on a perennial problem with happiness research:

[M]ost work in the psychological and social sciences suffers from a lack of conceptual rigor. It’s a bit sloppy around the edges, and in the middle, too. For example, “happiness research” is a booming field, but the titans of the subdiscipline disagree sharply about what happiness actually is. No experiment or regression will settle it. It’s a philosophical question. Nevertheless, they work like the dickens to measure it, whatever it is—life satisfaction, “flourishing,” pleasure minus pain—and to correlate it to other, more easily quantified things with as much statistical rigor as deemed necessary to appear authoritative. It’s as if the precision of the statistical analysis is supposed somehow to compensate for, or help us forget, the imprecision of thought at the foundation of the enterprise.

It’s interesting that Fredrickson in Positivity avoids the term “happiness,” because she feels “it’s murky and overused.” One may say the same of “positivity.” There is definitely murk. According to Fredrickson, the constituents of positivity are joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love. But why these emotions? Why not others? As an inventory of positivity, this seems arbitrary.

Tania Lombrozo responds by defending the messiness of psychological research:

There’s a natural back and forth: we think about things a particular way, which motivates experiments, which in turn provide data, which leads us to refine and revise the way we conceptualize phenomena and theoretical entities. This dance between theory and experimentation is common to all science.

In the case of psychology, it is a particularly young field. It’s early days for the empirical study of many core psychological phenomena, including happiness.

So I agree with Wilkinson that psychological theorizing is often imprecise, and I share a craving for conceptual rigor. But some conceptual sloppiness may simply be a sign of immaturity, of psychology’s adolescent state. It’s an unavoidable step in achieving scientific progress, not the mark of a failed or floundering science.

Previous Dish on Fredrickson’s work here and here.

by Matt Sitman

In a brilliant, depressing examination of lists and listicles, Mark O’Connell finds their deeper meaning:

In an interview with The Paris Review twenty years ago, Don DeLillo mentioned that “lists are a form of cultural hysteria.” From the vantage point of today, you wonder how much anyone—even someone as routinely prescient as DeLillo—could possibly have identified list-based hysteria in 1993. DeLillo’s statement also hints at something crucial about the list as a form: the tension between its gesturing toward order and its acknowledgement of order’s impossibility. The list—or, more specifically, the listicle—extends a promise of the definitive while necessarily revealing that no such promise could ever be fulfilled. It arises out of a desire to impose order on a life, a culture, a society, a difficult matter, a vast and teeming panorama of cat adorability and nineties nostalgia. Umberto Eco put it dramatically: “The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order.”

His take on why they’re the epitome of a culture actively arrayed against our attention spans: 

In an essay about Internet addiction in The Dublin Review last year, the Irish novelist and short-story writer Kevin Barry wrote about how the rapid depletion of his powers of attention affected the way he composes a piece of writing: “Lately, I note, most of the essays and stories I write tend to be broken up into very short, numbered sections, because I can no longer replicate on the page the impression or sensation of consecutive, concentrated thought, because I don’t really do that anymore.” Of course, essayists have been using the list as a way to structure thought for a long time. (Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,’” to point to a famous example, takes the form of a list of fifty-eight numbered fragments.) But the list is a way of writing that anticipates, and addresses itself to, a certain capriciousness in the reader. By not only allowing partial and fleeting engagement but by actively encouraging it, the list becomes the form which accommodates itself most smoothly to the way a lot of us read now, a lot of the time. It’s the house style of a distracted culture.

by Matt Sitman

Peter Reuell explains a study offering insight into the visual side of music:

In a study by Chia-Jung Tsay, who last year earned a Ph.D. in organizational behavior with a secondary Ph.D. field in music, nearly all participants — including highly trained musicians — were better able to identify the winners of competitions by watching silent video clips than by listening to audio recordings. The work was described in a paper published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s a very counterintuitive finding — there have been some interesting reactions from musicians,” Tsay said. “What this suggests is that there may be a way that visual information is prioritized over information from other modalities. In this case, it suggests that the visual trumps the audio, even in a setting where audio information should matter much more.”

Alva Noē meditates on the way music is more than just “sound art”:

When we listen to music we listen to a performance, in the literal sense. We pay attention to what someone, or a group of people, is doing before us. Music is action.

This has has been obscured somewhat by recording, whose advent has influenced how we think about music. The idea that music is about sound, peeled off from its inherence in the tapping, plucking, smacking, stroking, blowing, fingering and vocal actions of real people, or, divorced from the thoughts, feelings and ideas of performers, seems somehow plausible in an era where you buy pieces of plastic, or download digital files, to get at music. In addition, electronic music has seemed, to some, to be the final blow to what may now come to seem a quaint idea: that music is an art of the body, an art of the analog transduction of physical energies.

And so we easily lose sight of the fact that what we care about, when we care about music, is not sound, but musicians and their use of movement, the body, and material instruments, to articulate significance.

by Matt Sitman

Garret Johnson thinks so. He argues that reflection and humility “are two virtues that dystopian fiction, as a rule, argues are vital and necessary for any free, humane society” and that “also happen to be at the very core of Christian thought.” How he sees the former virtue at play in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:

More than just a novel about “censorship”—as the cover usually claims—Fahrenheit 451 is a picture of how private citizens’ lack of will to reflect, on anything, leads to censorship. And not just censorship of reading material, but a soul-crippling censorship of thought. Monolithic government-control has been achieved through the means of a thoroughly entertained populace. It’s a world where TV and sports and bite-sized snippets of inconsequential news have become the center of all culture and society. And reflection, thought, has become a pesky, bothersome thing that just gets in the way of all that. Reflection causes only sorrow, those in charge say. And so, for the good of society, books—which induce reflection far more than most things—are illegal.

Reviewing The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey, a study of the eponymous editor’s role in the creation of the science fiction genre, Michael Saler makes this observation about it’s relationship to religion:

Although Fictionalism privileges the secular imagination, it is not antithetical to religion. Some among the religious accept fictions as sources of revelation and endorse an “as if” attitude as the way to apprehend them. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, for example, had an ingenious strategy for addressing the widespread contemporary understanding of the Bible as a cultural rather than a revealed text. In advancing what Tolkien called “Mythopoeia,” the two tried to reverse the secular tide by defining fiction as theological. Fictions (like The Lord of the Rings or the “Narnia” series) were useful myths inspired by God — with the exception of Christianity, which itself was both mythic and true. Fundamentalists can also be enraptured with fiction as religious touchstone, which partly explains the extraordinary success of the “Left Behind” series of novels and video games.

Palmer was raised as a Catholic, but as an adult rejected doctrinaire belief and practice in favor of a no-less-spiritual, Fictionalist orientation to life: he venerated the imagination and the sense of wonder it engendered.