Category: The Dish

Stephen H. Webb criticizes John Updike’s biographer Adam Begley for not “getting to the heart of what he most cherished in his personal experiences” – especially the novelist’s attachment to Christianity:

The reason why critics as perceptive as Begley marginalize Updike’s religious faith has to do with the content of his theological convictions, not the lack of them. For Updike, writing was a religious act. He thought the best way to be a Christian and a writer was to try to be a very good writer (while, at the same time, avoiding any claim to being a good Christian). He reserved his deepest faith not for America but for the world as he saw it, on the theological assumption that the ordinary and everyday—the most mundane elements of human existence—are a gift from God. This strategy let him keep his most specifically Christian beliefs somewhat private, even as he never shied away from a public theology of praising God’s creation.

Webb – who notes he corresponded with Updike about the religious ideas in his novel Roger’s Version – goes on to unpack how the novelist was influenced by the great 20th century Protestant theologian Karl Barth:

Updike as a believer was saved by his reading of Barth, since he looked to him for “confirmation of the bad news about the human situation vis-à-vis ultimate reassurance.” As a writer, however, I am not so sure that Barth did him much good. There is a way of reading Barth that leads to a radical separation of faith from the world, so that the world, in all of its secularity, can be affirmed just as it is, without trying to impose a thick theological framework on it.

That is how Updike read Barth, but it is not how he read the world, since he was nearly medieval in his belief in the power of material objects to convey the sacred. Updike’s celebration of the everyday was not just rooted in a natural theology of the goodness of creation. It was also entangled in what I would call the metaphysics of a Eucharistic realism. He believed that material objects could be revelatory if given the proper words. Writing for Updike was a profoundly transubstantional act.

Recent Dish on Begley’s Updike biography here, here, and here. Check out a religion-related Updike short story here.

Nick Spencer claims that the emergence of modern atheism had less to do with “slow, steady scientific advance” than the disastrous collusion of religion and politics in early modern Europe:

“Science”—if we can treat that collection of disparate disciplines as one single, coherent enterprise—did have something to do with the growth of atheism in the West, but very much less than most imagine. Those three great moments of scientific progress—the Copernican revolution in the 16th century, the scientific revolution in the 17th and the Darwinian in the 19th—were hardly atheistic at all. Copernicus was a priest; Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, devout; and Charles Darwin incredulous that anyone could imagine evolution demanded godlessness. “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist,” he wrote in 1879.

In reality, the growth of atheism in Europe and America has much more to do with politics and, in particular, ecclesiastically backed politics, than it has with science, something that is clear even from its earliest days… Europe’s first public atheists were driven from mere scepticism and anti-clericalism to full-blown unbelief not by reason or scientific progress but primarily by a venal and violent theo-political settlement.

Which is one reason why, he goes on to argue, that only about 2% of Americans identify as atheists:

If atheism were a function of science and progress, then surely America, from the late 19th century the world’s most self-consciously modern and scientific nation, would become its atheistic capital. It didn’t—for reasons that go back to its founding.

Christianity was, of course, in the blood of the country’s first Anglophone settlers, but just as important was the fact that many American clergy enthusiastically supported the revolution. They described it as a just war and Christianity became associated with the people’s political emancipation, in a way that it did only partially in Britain, and not at all in France.

At the same time, the nation’s new constitution did not refer to God (beyond the reference to the Year of our Lord in Article VII), precluded any religious test from becoming a requirement for office, and, most famously, in its First Amendment, legislated against Congress making any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” … This could be construed as de facto godlessness—indeed it was and is—but in reality it ended up being the nation’s strongest bulwark against atheism, denying the church the temporal power that had done it so much harm in Europe and effectively draining the wells of moral indignation on which atheists drew.

Lauren Ely portrays the Irish director John Michael McDonagh’s new film, Calvary, as capturing “the horror of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church while at the same time presenting a case for the necessity of the institutional priesthood.” The plot centers on a threat to kill the main character, Fr. James, made during confession by a parishioner who was raped by a now dead priest as a child:

What follows is a surprisingly complex, if imperfectly executed, meditation on the nature of sin and mercy, set in the epicenter of the sexual abuse scandal. We are introduced one by one to Fr. James’s parishioners, each with their own set of problems including drug use, adultery, and prostitution to name only a few. Their attitudes toward the parish priest range from begrudging respect to apathy to outright contempt. Every hackneyed anti-Church saying one can think of is used by the townspeople as a taunt against Fr. James: that the Church is only out for money, that priests are control freaks, that Catholicism has no good answer for the problem of evil. By contrast we see Fr. James doing the hard, daily work of the priest with dogged fidelity as he counsels prisoners, administers last rites in the middle of the night, and comforts a young widow. The film paints very clearly the life of the priest in stark relief to the world’s perception of what a priest is, all while allowing Fr. James to retain his spirited, gruff, flawed humanity.

S. Brent Plate sees the film grappling both with the abuse perpetrated by the Church and “what occurs in the wake of that abuse” – that is, what happens to a society when an institution like the Church collapses:

Calvary depicts a land freeing itself from the constraints of the church, from the ethics of obedience to commandments, from the compulsions of hell. Father James dwells among them, though retains little authority, like the church itself. He still hands out Communion to those who come, but the parish is hollowed out. When the church building burns down Father James is upset, even if no one seems surprised. The church itself becomes the sacrifice that allows society to live on. But at what cost is not clear.

The alternatives to the ethical and spiritual influence of religion are not all they are cracked up to be. The smart and rational-minded fritter life away with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The commoners don’t appear to have the sense to make sense. The rich piss it away. The sensitive become self-destructive to the point of suicide. While under the shadow of a corrupt church, Calvary ultimately questions the integrity and sustainability of a secular world. The final scene repeats the opening scene, even as it inverts it. The secular confessional seems dim by comparison.

In an interview, McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson, who plays Fr. James, discussed that issue as well:

BG: For a while there, the Celtic Tiger was bling. It was quite vacuous, and not very nice to witness, to be honest. There was a kind of vacuousness as to what people were substituting for spirituality. It’s still an open question. People are coming around to perhaps understanding that they have a responsibility to contribute to the answer. That they can’t just expect to be led all the time, that they have to contribute to a positive viewpoint and get constructive about the way they intend to live their lives.

JMM: And I think what we’re saying now is, after all the crashes and all the scandals, is that I don’t think it’s led to a complete negativity. I think there are more and more people seeking [something], whether it’s a spiritual meaning or a political meaning to their lives. Sometimes you have to have a great depression, but other, more positive values can come out of that. Sometimes you have to be at the lowest ebb for things to get better.

Jonardon Ganeri discusses (NYT) how, in Hinduism, “a personal God does not figure prominently as the source of the idea of the divine, and instead non-theistic concepts of the divine prevail”:

One such concept sees the text of the Veda as itself divine. … Recitation of the text is itself a religious act. Another Hindu conception of the divine is that it is the essential reality in comparison to which all else is only concealing appearance. This is the concept one finds in the Upanishads. Philosophically the most important claim the Upanishads make is that the essence of each person is also the essence of all things’; the human self and brahman (the essential reality) are the same.

This identity claim leads to a third conception of the divine: that inwardness or interiority or subjectivity is itself a kind of divinity. On this view, religious practice is contemplative, taking time to turn one’s gaze inwards to find one’s real self; but — and this point is often missed — there is something strongly anti-individualistic in this practice of inwardness, since the deep self one discovers is the same self for all.

Ganeri also emphasizes the religion’s “long heritage of tolerance of dissent and difference” – a heritage he attributes, in part, to Hinduism’s approach to religious texts:

One explanation of this tolerance of difference is that religious texts are often not viewed as making truth claims, which might then easily contradict one another. Instead, they are seen as devices through which one achieves self transformation. Reading a religious text, taking it to heart, appreciating it, is a transformative experience, and in the transformed state one might well become aware that the claims of the text would, were they taken literally, be false. So religious texts are seen in Hinduism as “Trojan texts” (like the Trojan horse, but breaking through mental walls in disguise). Such texts enter the mind of the reader and help constitute the self. The Hindu attitude to the Bible or the Quran is the same, meaning that the sorts of disagreements that arise from literalist readings of the texts tend not to arise.

(Image: Rigveda manuscript in Devanagari, early 19th century, via Wikimedia Commons)

Pivoting off S.E. Cupp’s assertion, Robert Tracinski suggests atheists could play a significant role in popularizing right-wing ideas:

For those of us who don’t believe in a deity or supernatural power, the way we try to settle arguments is by pointing to observable facts. Do human beings flourish better under capitalism or socialism? Let’s look at the history of the two systems and see how they turned out. Will a welfare state eliminate poverty or perpetuate it for 50 years? It’s been 50 years, so let’s look at the result. And so on. The questions can get a lot more subtle, and the answers much deeper and philosophical, but you get the idea.

My point is not just that it is possible to offer a secular defense of free markets and liberty and the moral values that support them. My point that is these arguments have a power to persuade that cannot be matched just by quoting chapter and verse from the Bible. … We speak a language most people on the Right are already speaking. But it also makes us ideally suited for reaching out to a wider audience and showing them they can embrace free markets, for example, without having to embrace a conservative theology.

Razib Khan raises an eyebrow:

Trancinski goes on to talk about the relationship between conservatism and science at some length. I can speak here personally, as I am a scientist and a conservative. One issue is while most liberals may not be scientists, most scientists are liberals. Those who are not are invariably libertarians. I would cop to being conservative, albeit with a strong libertarian streak. And that makes me exceptional.

The culture of scientists and culture of religious conservatives are so opposed to each other that a Christian evangelical friend who is an evolutionary biologist once told me he was asked literally every day how he could be a scientist and a Christian. I have been in the room several times where scientists talk about how they can outreach to the broader public, like conservatives, assuming of course that there were no conservatives in the room. I think this correlation is a logical necessity. It’s an empirical sociological fact. And we have to deal with in our political and policy culture.

Jennifer Tilly goes to town as a dominatrix in a NSFW clip from Dancing at the Blue Iguana:

Mitsu Mark shares what she learned as a professional dominatrix who worked at three commercial dungeons in NYC. One point she stresses – her clients didn’t fit a “type”:

I’m often nudged to confirm the stereotype of the dungeon client as a high-powered executive, a controlling breadwinner who comes to a dominatrix because it is his only release from the stress of his daily alpha role. I’m sure that does exist. Successful businessmen do make up a good portion of dungeon clientele, but that’s probably a result of the price of entry. However, I never had a typical client demographic that otherwise differed much from that of the greater New York City male population (I rarely had female clients, which is another can of worms).

I saw guys from a huge variety of economic backgrounds, nationalities, and ethnicities, with all sorts of career paths, social group affiliations, political leanings, and religions.

I had older (okay, mostly older—and some way older) clients, and clients who looked like they’d saved up their allowances to see me (we did card those). Some were douchebags; some were sweethearts. Some were shy—and others chatted up every person they encountered on the way in, talked through the entire session to me as well as on their phones, and asked to be paraded down the streets of Manhattan in pink tutus. Some were virgins; some were married with children. Some were out, and some were paranoid about being identified to the point of wearing sunglasses through their sessions—well, one guy did that.

The men I saw walk through the dungeon doors represented all walks of life. Their only common denominator was the dungeon, of all things.