The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Media: Constantinian media

Miami priest Alberto Cutie is found in an illicit sexual relationship.  A few days later he’s on CBS “Early Show” confessing and explaining what happened.  Did his bishop approve the media appearance?

“Constantinianism” is, in Yoder’s terms, the church’s peace with the world; as RR Reno has explained Hauerwas, the protest against Constantinianism is a protest against everything that makes the church weightless and invisible.  

It’s a protest worth making, but it shouldn’t be made only against the church’s relation to political power.  There’s an equally pointed protest to be made against the church’s coziness with media power, which is, today, a far more insidious and real temptation than the supposed temptation to theocracy.

Doesn’t the church have its own ways of dealing with sin, confession, discipline, restoration?  Do we want media rummaging around in the church’s business any more than we want the state meddling?

Media: Down with Facebook

Matt Labash has a hilarious send-up of Facebook (on which I am not) in the latest issue of the Weekly Standard.  It’s a massive target: “Facebook had just added its 150-millionth member and since last August is signing up 374,000 people each day. It has achieved absolute critical mass, thus compounding its utility and effectiveness. Not joining now is an affectation in itself, like refusing to own a cellphone or rejecting the social lubricant of antiperspirant.”

Middle-aged folks are the fasting-growing segment of the Facebook family: “35-54 year-olds have increased 276.4 percent to nearly 7 million users in just the last six months.”

Labash says, “Time magazine recently declared Facebook more popular than porn. But who are they kidding? Facebook is porn. With porn, you watch other people take off their clothes and abase themselves in public. On Facebook, where there’s technically an anti-nudity policy (thus defeating the whole purpose of the Internet), you get to figuratively do the same.”

Media: Distracted

Maggie Jackson (Distracted) writes, “One yearlong study found that workers not only switch tasks every three minutes during their workday but that nearly half the time they interrupt themselves.”  

And this: “Nearly a third of fourteen- to twenty-one-year olds juggle five to eight media while doing homework.”

I interrupted my reading to jot this down on my blog, btw.

Media: Screen friends

The redoubtable Caitlin Flanagan has an insightful and funny review of Edward Kline’s biography of Katie Couric in the current issue of the Atlantic.  Part of the review details Flanagan’s own “friendship” with the Couric of the Today show, but Flanagan characteristically goes beyond autobiography to explain Couric’s appeal.  She found Today most  necessary during the time when she was at home raising twin toddlers; Couric provided adult company after all the other adults had left the house:

“It is into this emotional void that the Today show’s second hour comes to the rescue, trumpets blaring: out with the first hour’s reports on war and politics and economic trends, and in come pieces on family and shopping and decorating.  ‘The men are gone,’ the show seems to tell us.  ‘Now we can talk about the things we love’: the exact way to sneak vegetables into the diet of a finicky toddler, the trick to putting aside a little money for a family treat, the essential components of a first-aid kid for the car – all the minutiae of running a household, presented without irony or scorn by hugely compensated media celebrities. . . .

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Media: Attributed Celebrity

Chris Rojek describes celebrity as “the attribution of glamorous or notorious status to an individual within the public sphere.” He recognizes there are other forms of celebrity: the “ascribed” celebrity of inherited status (Prince William, eg), and the “achieved” celebrity of an accomplished musician or writer or actor or sports figure.

But attributed celebrity is a “cultural fabrication,” constructed by “cultural intermediaries who operate to stage-manage celebrity presence in the eyes of the public,” mediators such as “agents, publicists, marketing personnel, promoters, photographers, fitness trainers, wardrobe staff, cosmetics experts and personal assistants. Their task is to concoct the public presentation of celebrity personalities that will result in an enduring appeal for the audience of fans.”

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Media: Scenes of free speech

The first rule of Adcult, Twitchell says, is “Speech is never free.” For example:

“In 1986 the [Reader's] Digest turned town an advertising supplement on heart disease and cigarette smoking prepared by the American Heart Association.” The Digest had never printed cigarette ads, but they turned down the supplement because “The RJR Nabisco and Philip Morris companies not only make cigarettes, they also package food stuffs through their Del Monte, Nabisco, General Foods, and Kraft subsidiaries. Those foodstuffs are a major source of the Digest‘s advertising revenue.”

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Media: Eat Popcorn

In his highly entertaining history of American Advertising (Adcult USA) James Twitchell summarizes the dubious contribution of James Vicary to our understanding of subliminal advertising. Vicary claimed that by inserting subliminal messages to “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coke,” he had caused movie audiences to increase popcorn consumption by 57.5% and Coca-cola sales by 18.1%. Vicary never divulged how his experiments were controlled, or where he conducted them. Twitchell says he made them up.

In January 1958, Vicary flashed his “Eat Popcorn” sign before “an audience of members of Congress, bureaucrats from appropriate agencies, reporters, and broadcasters.” An advertising magazine, Printer’s Ink, summarized the results: “Having gone to see something that is not supposed to be seen, and having not seen it, as forecast, the FCC and Congressmen seemed satisfied.” Senator Charles Potter commented afterwards, “I think I want a hot dog.”

Media: Instruments of torture

The “Middle Ages only had thumb screws, not the media.”

-Karl Kraus, early 20th century Viennese writer

Media: Means and ends

Thoreau wrote, “Our inventions . . . are but improved means to an unimproved end. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

But once the cable’s laid, we’re faced with what de Zengotita calls the “Justin’s bike helmet” syndrome: Since it’s available, it seems that it’s better, on balance, to make use of it.

Media: Mediated

Instead of continuing to quote de Zengotita until I’ve transcribed the whole book, let me summarize: This is the best anthropology of contemporary culture I’ve ever read. Somewhat reductive – I’m not sure that everything is so shaped by media as de Zengotita suggests. Mostly he makes a very compelling case for tying in our politics, relation to time and things, our habits of thought and feeling to the fact that (in one of his most succinct formulations) we live “in a world that is made up of a flattering field of represented options.”

He offers no “solutions.” In some ways, this is one of the strengths of the book. He suggests that the expectation of “solutions” is itself a media-induced expectation, one of the genre conventions of cultural commentary – a demand that leads to what he calls “bogosity.” Yet, not responding is impossible; not responding is a response, a decision to go with the flow. But if de Zengotita makes one thing clear, it’s that any real response or stance toward this world has to be a communal one, taking the form of a counter-culture.

Media: Predictable surprise

De Zengotita again, commenting on how lame action/sci fi movies have become: “There’s this very specific phase in so many of these films, a phase that’s so marked I bet there’s some insider lingo for it. It’s when the suspenseful set-up phase – which is often pretty good, very atmospheric, intriguing character foibles – ends and the resolution phase begins. At that point, everything seems to go on automatic, and the rest of the movie spins out flat and formulaic, but really loud and fast, as if hoping to distract you from the vacuity. It’s like the writer and director just give up. They somehow manage to make their endings old hat and over the top at the same time. A weird combination.”

In short, mediation has “achieved predictable surprise.”

Media: Mediating the Other

De Zengotita notes the paradox of modernity/postmodernity’s affirmation of the Other: “instead of treating the Other as an alien something – threatening in some cases, alluring in others, but in all cases an object, whether of conquest, exploitation, proselytizing, study, or tourism – instead of that, you recognize in the other an autonomy and agency equal to your own and place yourself in a reciprocal relationship of dialogue with the Other, etc. This is the most visible, the postive, aspect of the otherness trope. The cardinal rule is to acknowledge the Other as other; that is, as categorically different from you. But that’s a good thing; difference is good.”

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Media: Mediated

Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita (Bloomsbury, 2005) comes highly recommended from Ken Myers. No wonder. This is a very thoughtful book, written with great energy. Every paragraph is quotable, and has the effect of holding up a mirror to the way we live now. For instance, comparing our penchant for “capturing the moment” in pictures with someone obsessively pulling the lever on a slot machine, de Zengotita says, “It gets like that with cameras on vacations, but not because of intermittent reinforcement. It’s because you don’t want to miss anything. Just seeing something counts as missing it. . . . The result is that you don’t really see anything. You either skim over it because it isn’t worth taking a picture of, or you take a picture of it. When you take a picture of it you feel as if you have it forever so you don’t have to really look at it. You are free to move on, looking for the next thing you can’t afford to miss.”

Media: Community and New Communications

Mark Poster points to a tension between the modern institutions of production and the postmodern technologies of communication, particularly as they impact the formation of the self: “If modernity or the mode of production signifies patterned practices that elicit identities as autonomous and (instrumentally) rational, postmodernity or the mode of information indicates communication practices that constitute subjects as unstable, multiple and diffuse. The information superhighway and virtual reality will extend the mode of information to still further applications, greatly amplifying its diffusion by bringing more practices and more individuals within its pattern of formation.”

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Media: Telephone

Prior to World War I, Telefon Hirmondo, the telephone system of Budapest, was used as a broadcast system, with a published schedule of programs that were restricted to certain classes of people in Hungary. Only later did it develop into a communications system in which everyone could pass information to anyone.

Media: Art for Art

Adorno points out in an essay on television that “it would be romanticizing to assume that formlerly art was entirely pure, that the creative artist thought only in terms of the inner consistency of the artifact and not also of its effect upon the spectators. Theatrical art, in particular, cannot be separated from audience reaction. Conversely, vestiges of the aesthetic claim to be something autonomous, a world unto itself, remain even within the most trivial product of mass culture. In fact, the present rigid division of art into autonomous and commercial aspects is itself largely a function of commercialization. It was hardly accidental that the slogan l’art pour l’art was coined polemically in Paris of the first half of the nineteenth century, when literature really became large-scale business for the first time. Many of the cultural products bearing the anti-commercial trademark ‘art for art’s sake’ show traces of commercialism in their appeal to the sensational or in the conspicuous display of material wealth and sensuous stimuli at the expense of the meaningfulness of the work.”

Media: Circulation of opinion

Last week, The New Republic posted a lengthy article by Jerry Coyne on Intelligent Design (ID) on its web site, along with a brief piece by Leon Wieseltier. Yesterday, the local paper carried a brief excerpt from the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch, claiming that ID should be recognized as veiled philosophy and religion rather than as science. Of course, the impetus for this flurry is the result of Bush’s favorable comments about ID, but the transmission is intriguing: From the Washington offices of TNR, to Columbus’s major newspaper, to Moscow in less than a week. It looks like a groundswell of opinion in opposition to ID, but it’s only Jerry Coyne and Leon Wieseltier.

Media: Power and Celebrity

In his 1999 book, How the News Makes Us Dumb, C. John Sommerville wisely notes the difference between power and celebrity. He notes that news is a product, determined by “what publishers think they can get us interested in and get us to pay for.” There’s no reason, then, to think that events in the news are the most important events taking place: “In fact, there is reason to doubt that. Important people don’t like to be in the news. Power could probably be defined as the ability to keep onself out of the news. Celebrities like to be in the news, and the media have found that we will pay as much to read about them as about important people. So we fill our minds with a lot of fun stories, while the powerful go about their business.”

Media: In Praise of Censorship

David Bentley Hart offers a lively and wide-ranging defense of censorship in an article in the current issue of First Things. He savages the standard arguments against censorship: the slippery-slope argument (Hart: “Apparently, as a society, we are poised precariously upon the narrowest precipice of a sheer escarpment as smooth as class, overlooking a vast chasm of totalitarian tyranny; so much as a single step towards censorship will send us hurtling into the abyss, and nothing will be able to stay our fall”); the fear that philistines will take over the censorship apparatus (Hart: “it is not necessarily a bad thing for the artist who wishes to treat of things usually left decently veiled to have to submit his work to the ordeal of prevailing moral prejudice”). In the end, he worries that there judicious censors can still be found: “I do not believe that, if we were to create some sort of board of censors, we would be likely to suffer the reign of the American equivalent of Soviet realist art; but this is in part because the persons we would choose for the office might not be sufficiently sophisticated to rise to so plausible a level of philistinism. Simply said, it may be that we no longer have enough civilization to save.”

He reserves the worst argument for last: That censorship denies people what they want. “To find this a compelling argument,” Hart points out, one must already be convinced of the inalienable sanctity of choice, over against every other social good, and convinced, moreover, that freedom and choice are more or less synonymous.” The real problem is not censorship per se, but perverse ideas of liberty. Freedom, he argues, is not the ability to do whatever we choose, but is about the ability to flourish fully as the kind of thing it is. Freedom in this sense is not opposed to restraint; freedom in this sense requires restraint. Restraint of action and passion for the sake of honor or virtue liberates “from the momentary impulses and vain promptings of the will, and arrives at what can truly be called one’s essence.” True freedom is perfect restraint – Augustine’s non posse peccare. On a larger level, a society devoted to the preservation of libertarian freedom “must of necessity progressively conclude that all things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as ‘nature,’ that we are out own creatures.” Any society that “refuses all censorship is in some very crucial sense extremely unjust.”

Hart began his essay saying that “things could conceivably be far worse,” but the thrust of his analysis is that things are going to BE worse. And they could be worse because the apparent battle lines between the purveyors of indecency and the advocates of decency is a blurry one: Referring to Janet Jackson’s “costume malfunction” at this year’s Superbowl, Hart speculates, “I suspect that among those who professed their dismay at the halftime show there are many who as a rule are willing to tolerate most of the corrosive influences that invade family life – from advertising, films, popular music; the Internet, video games, the language we have all become accustomed to hearing every day ?Eso long as those influences continue unobtrusively to operate in their ‘proper’ places.” He suggests that “the true depth of our social division is . . . difficult to ascertain.” It is “only when we honestly ask ourselves what remedy we are willing to contemplate” that it becomes “clear whether as a people we are truly engaged in a ‘culture war’ . . . or are simply witnessing the effects of a genuine but transcient tension between more refractory and more energetic elements within a single cultural process.”

What to do? Hart suggests withdrawing from the bombardment of indecency that comes through the media, home-schooling and Christian schooling, cultivating “archaic enthusiasms.” And this: “Probably the most subversive and effective strategy we might undertake would be one of militant fecundity: abundant, relentless, exuberant, and defiant childbearing. Given the reluctance of modern men and women to be fruitful and multiply, it would not be difficult, surely, for the devout to accomplish ?Ein no more than a generation or two ?Ea demographic revolution.” This would place constraints on income and time, but “if it is a war we want, we should not recoil from sacrifice.”

Media: McLuhan and Teilhard

Tom Wolfe has a fascinating sketch of the life and work of Marshall McLuhan in the Spring 2004 issue of The Wilson Quarterly. McLuhan converted to Catholicism during his studies, and Wolfe suggests that McLuhan’s greatest inspiration was a hidden one, Teilhard de Chardin. Wolfe writes, “Regardless of what anybody thought of [Teilhard's] theology, the man’s powers of prediction were astonishing. He died in 1955, when television had nly recently come into widespread use and the microchip had not even been invented. Computers were huge machines, big as a suburban living room, that were not yet in assembly-line production. But he was already writings about ‘the extraordinary network of radio and television communication which already links us all in a sort of “etherised” human consciousness,’ and of ‘those astonishing electronic computers which enhance the “speed of thought” and pave the way for a revolution in the sphere of research.’ Ths technology was creating a ‘nervous system for humanity,’ he wrote, ‘a single, organized unbroken membrane over the earth,’ a ‘stupendous thinking machine.’ ‘The age of civilization has ended, and that of one civilization’ ?Ehe underlined ‘one civilization’ – ‘is beginning.’ That unbroken membrance, that noosphere, was, of course, McLuhan’s ‘seamless web of experience.’ And that ‘one civilization’ was his ‘global village.’” McLuhan avoided mentioning Teilhard’s influence publicly, Wolfe suggests, because there were questions about Teilhard’s orthodoxy, and because secular social scientists would have looked askance at McLuhan’s work if he had revealed the theological inspirations behind it.

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