Author: Dish Staff

He Worshipped His Way

by Dish Staff

Frank Sinatra discussed his approach to faith in a 1963 interview with Playboy:

Playboy: All right, let’s start with the most basic question there is: Are you a religious man? Do you believe in God?

Sinatra: Well, that’ll do for openers. I think I can sum up my religious feelings in a couple of paragraphs. First: I believe in you and me. I’m like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life—in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don’t believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice. I’m not unmindful of man’s seeming need for faith; I’m for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. But to me religion is a deeply personal thing in which man and God go it alone together, without the witch doctor in the middle. The witch doctor tries to convince us that we have to ask God for help, to spell out to him what we need, even to bribe him with prayer or cash on the line. Well, I believe that God knows what each of us wants and needs. It’s not necessary for us to make it to church on Sunday to reach Him. You can find Him anyplace. And if that sounds heretical, my source is pretty good: Matthew, Five to Seven, The Sermon on the Mount.

Playboy: You haven’t found any answers for yourself in organized religion?

Sinatra: There are things about organized religion which I resent. Christ is revered as the Prince of Peace, but more blood has been shed in His name than any other figure in history. You show me one step forward in the name of religion and I’ll show you a hundred retrogressions.

Update from a reader:

Kitty Kelly, in “His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra,” claims the interview (questions and answers) was written by Mike Shore, Sinatra’s friend and an executive with Reprise Records; however, Sinatra did sign off on it against the advice of people who feared the effect it may have on his career, so good for Frank. The interview is getting a lot of play on the Internets today – I was initially surprised by (and then suspicious of) Sinatra’s eloquence, but I’ll defer to James Phalen, over at Why Evolution is True, who offered the clearest skeptical eye regarding the interview’s authorship: “Only Steven Pinker (and Hitch before him) speaks (or spoke) in complete paragraphs.”

(Hat Tip: 3QD)

Return To Pangaea

by Dish Staff

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Morgan Meis meditates on the symbolic meaning of the Panama Canal, which officially opened 100 years ago this month:

[F]or all this talk of progress and accumulated knowledge of the continents and seas, there is also something prehistoric about the desire to bring all the continents closer together. That’s because they were all together once. … On Pangaea, what we now know as Africa was nestled in the crook between North and South America, almost like a baby. Eurasia was connected to the top of North America. Then, over millions of years, the land mass began to break up, due to motion of the tectonic plates. The continents separated from one another. The oceans filled up the spaces in between. What was one, split into many.

Unknowingly, unconsciously, the engineers of the Panama Canal were acting as agents of the ancient supercontinent of Pangaea. Bring it all back together. Shorten the distances. Heal the wounds, maybe, from the terrible splitting that tore the world out of its oneness hundreds of millions of years ago. That is how it can seem, anyway, when you take the long view, when you look at it from a geological perspective. It is like an old dream of continental unity that we never knew we had. It is like the crust beneath the earth found a way to influence the minds of the men who crawl upon the surface. “Bring us back together.” You can hear it whispered from the cracks and crevices and fault lines that go down into the dark places beneath.

(Image of the Panama Canal as seen from space via Wikimedia Commons)

Poems From The Country Parson

by Dish Staff

Reviewing John Drury’s Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, Mark Jarman traces the distinctiveness of Herbert’s religious vision to his years as a priest in a country parish – a situation quite different from that of his contemporary John Donne:

I don’t think we can ignore this dimension of George Herbert’s career, even as it seems to be the mirror opposite of John Donne’s. Where Herbert forsook the dish_herbertchurch aspiration of a career at court for a life in the country, Donne extricated himself from his country exile and got himself installed in a big urban church. … Herbert got his taste of worldliness at Cambridge, and as the son of his remarkable mother, and the rest from observing and living among and serving the good country people of his parishes. Increasingly, I think it is helpful to understand how George Herbert lived and believed in order to appreciate fully the beauty of his poetry. So much of the poetry acknowledges an ordinary human ambivalence with regard to faith. With John Donne, I recognize something else, something more dramatic, especially in his religious poetry—and that is the lineaments of ambition thrown into relief by apprehension and anxiety about the grace of God and the fear both that he may not be worthy of it and that he may not believe in it. I do not mean to imply that Herbert by contrast is more complacent, but he is more aware of the subtlety of belief, especially in its daily practices and encounters with God.

Recent Dish on Herbert here. We featured his poetry Easter weekend here, here, and here.

(Photo of stained glass depicting Herbert at Saint Andrew’s church in Bemerton, Wiltshire, where he was a rector, by Flickr user Granpic)

“I Feel, Therefore I Am”

by Dish Staff

Alan Lightman shares the “tentative conclusions” he’s drawn from thinking about how to live with the belief that law, culture, and social codes “have no intrinsic value outside of our minds”:

[U]ntil the day when we can upload our minds to computers, we are confined to our physical body and brain. And, for better or for worse, we are stuck with our personal mental state, which includes our personal pleasures and pains. Whatever concept we have of reality, without a doubt we experience personal pleasure and pain. We feel. Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” We might also say, “I feel, therefore I am.” And when I talk about feeling pleasure and pain, I do not mean merely physical pleasure and pain. Like the ancient Epicureans, I mean all forms of pleasure and pain: intellectual, artistic, moral, philosophical, and so on. All of these forms of pleasure and pain we experience, and we cannot avoid experiencing them. They are the reality of our bodies and minds, our internal reality. And here is the point I have reached: I might as well live in such a way as to maximize my pleasure and minimize my pain. Accordingly, I try to eat delicious food, to support my family, to create beautiful things, and to help those less fortunate than myself because those activities bring me pleasure. Likewise, I try to avoid leading a dull life, to avoid personal anarchy, and to avoid hurting others because those activities bring me pain. That is how I should live.

Stick To Fiction?

by Dish Staff

Paul Seaton pans novelist Marilynne Robinson’s political commentary, claiming that her “high intelligence and humane sensibility seem to flee her when she looks to her right”:

In literary terms, Marilynne Robinson is a national treasure. In political terms, not so much. “When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad she was horrid,” as the nursery rhyme has it. Robinson might not even mind my saying that, by the way. As an essayist she deliberately tries to make countercultural moves, intellectually and spiritually.

Unfortunately, Robinson’s political views as expressed in her latest collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books, are far from countercultural if by that we mean unusual. They’re off-the-shelf liberal. Like her hero, President Obama, she is disinclined to be fair to those who disagree with her—social conservatives, Tea Partiers, Republicans, the Right. Social conservative concerns for the moral standards and social fabric of the country, reasonable apprehensions about entitlements, the national debt, the injustice of burdening following generations because of our shirking of responsibility, and serious concerns about constitutional infidelity, become distorted by her into ungenerosity and rank partisanship.

Carl Scott adds:

Robinson, a Calvinist, is arguably a product of an earlier time, but it remains significant that our liberal churches provide a religious home for people like her. It is out of such churches, I dare to hope, that there may come the leaders necessary to reform/moderate/cleanse the Democratic Party, or at least one wing of it, if the hour for that long-needed movement ever arrives. And she is of course right that there is a deep connection between modern democracy and Calvinism, as our Ralph Hancock has explored.

Peter Lawler also offers measured appreciation for some of her ideas:

Robinson’s narrative is about the authentically Puritanical American Left, which wouldn’t, of course, be embraced by most of our liberals today. I wish more of today’s Christian leftists would at least join her battle against scientism, against those who deny the real existence of the wondrous love that’s at the foundation of the truth about human exceptionalism. The ”social justice” emphasis of our liberal churches these days gives little to no attention to the actual theology she’s recovered that once justified generous political progressivism.

Finding The Words For Wonder

by Dish Staff

W.S. Merwin recites his poem “Yesterday”:

Fiona Sampson appreciates how the poems in The Moon before Morning, the former Poet Laureate’s latest volume, “don’t explore topics so much as enact a kind of close attention to them that is indistinguishable from rapture”:

The movement and music of these poems is so involving that it’s easy to miss their underlying world view. Everything is connected, and everything is also always in motion. If Merwin were a philosopher, we would call him a pre-Socratic and place him alongside Heraclitus: “Even if I were to return it would not be / the place we came to one evening down a narrow lane / […] leading down to the edge of a small river” as his poem ‘Still’ says. If Merwin were a physicist he would belong with Robert Brown of Brownian motion.

Other poets have tried to capture this perpetual motion. Fredrich Hölderlin wrote about the “on-rushing word”; Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s rapturous wordiness attempted to act out revolutionary motion. But Merwin shows us that the discipline of attention, “a time of waiting / hoping to hear”, is enough.

Calling Merwin one of the few great living poets, Sampson adds a recommendation: “Read him while he is still contemporary.”

Philosophize Hard

by Dish Staff

Tom Hawking is “100 percent serious” about acknowledging Andrew W.K. (of “Party Hard” fame) as a philosopher for our times. He cites W.K.’s recent response to a reader of his Village Voice advice column who asked him why he’s so obsessed with “partying”:

In his answer to the question, Andrew W.K. took the opportunity to set out his views on life: “I take joy very seriously, and partying is the formal pursuit of celebration itself.” He argues that expression of joy is fundamental to our nature: “Believing that joy is wrong is the most violent disrespect to our inherent nature as loving, pleasure seeking creatures. Let us elevate ourselves and embrace our highest and mightiest capacity for happiness.” And, ultimately, he suggests that it’s from this that one can derive some sort of meaning for existence: “This life is our chance to unleash as much joy onto the world as we can.” Y’know what that is? That’s philosophy.

He evaluates W.K. as a “secular humanist”:

His idea of partying recalls the pleasure principle one of the very earliest humanists, Epicurus (although, in fairness, Epicureanism would probably frown on partying ’til you puke). There’s also a healthy dose of existentialism in there: when he asks “What’s all the rest of this madness for otherwise?”, he’s confronting the concept of the absurd, and in suggesting that the meaning we derive from our lives is “to remain at play and in awe, not to mock the severity of our collective plight, but to truly stay engaged in the bewildering and ferocious grandeur of this adventure we’re on together,” he’s come up with a strategy that sounds a lot more fun than embracing Kierkegaard’s answer (religious faith, basically) or resigning yourself to pushing a Sisyphean rock up a hill for all eternity. … [T]he point is that Andrew W.K. is addressing very similar questions to those that get addressed in philosophy departments around the world every day — and he’s doing so for a much larger audience (including, by the way, that of the student union at Oxford University, where he gave a talk titled “The Philosophy of Partying” a couple of months back.)

Face Of The Day

by Dish Staff

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Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher photographed Westerners who traveled to India to find enlightenment. Alyssa Coppelman comments on their three-part series, The Searchers:

There is, of course, a difference between delving seriously into the practice of meditation—something the world’s population would no doubt benefit from—and donning another culture’s clothing in what could be perceived as an effort to zip-line one’s way to nirvana. It’s as if the holy experience is in the costume rather than in the practice, and the state of mind they’re legitimately in search of is being reduced to an inappropriate Halloween costume.—even if it’s not really the case. What role does wearing robes or a turban play in bringing the wearer closer to their goals? From the outside, some of them look like they’re wearing a Halloween costume—which is why, accurate or not, it also evokes “Columbusing,” the recently-popular term for the age-old practice of cultural appropriation. And yet, this is all a part of Bezzubov and Sucher’s examination of the subject, and it is their openness to and acknowledgment of this implicit facet that makes this series so engrossing and appealing.

See more of their work here.