The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

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: 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.

Media: Scruton on Westernism

Roger Scruton reviews David Hurst’s *On Westernism* in the January 23 issue of the TLS. While challenging Hurst’s use of Richard Dawkins’s concept of “meme,” he concludes that it is an important book about the contours and imposition of the global ideology that Hurst calls Westernism. Here’s Scruton’s summary of Hurst’s central thesis: “we find ourselves in a world where ideas that have no intrinsic rationality have gained ascendancy over what ought to be, and once were, self-evident truths. For example, feminism has all but obliterated the knowledge that sexual differences are deep-rooted and unalterable. Multiculturalism has obscured the truth that mass immigration without cultural assimilation destabilized the host societies. liberalism has corroded the distinctions between criticism and treason and between innocence and guilt. Egalitarianism has taught ut to treat the raucous culture of television as a harmless diversion, comparable to the high culture that it has all but silenced. Socialism has promoted the view that state schooling can be devoted to social engineering and still be a form of education.”

As Scruton points out, the problem is not just that this collection of isms is widely (and sometimes contradictorily) believed. The problem is that they are enforced with all the intolerant zealotry of some narrow and bigoted religious faith. As he says, “a public critic of multiculturalism or feminism has little chance of promotion in the education industry, and witch-hunts and show-trials of those regarded as politically incorrect are now commonplace. . . . We are all familiar with the accusations of racism, sexism or homophobia against everyone who steps out of line, and the near impossiblity of obtaining a hearing (still less a fair trial) once such a charge has been laid. Moreover, such accusations seem to target the same broad class or people: those who exemplify or defend traditional forms of social order, and the once settled customs of our civilization.”

Media: Epstein on Steiner

Joseph Epstein goes to town pricking the inflated reputation of George Steiner in the Feb 16 issue of the Weekly Standard. Among his jibes: “I once, in print, referred to Harold Bloom as George Steiner without the sense of humor, which was, as Senator Claghorn used to say, ‘A joke, I say, that’s a joke, son,’ because more humorless than Steiner human beings do not come.” And, “Steiner’s pretensions are to polymathy. He claims just about all knowledge as his province. His reading is three stages beyond omnivorous ?Ealthough he might admit, on the rare occasion, to a bad conscience over not reading an eight-volume history of the French Revolution (by Georges Sorel) that you had not hitherto known existed.” And, “At one point in his text Steiner refers to ‘mandarin ostentation’ and at another remarks upon usin an ‘orotund flourish’ deliberately. But without mandarin ostentation and orotund flourishes, Steiner’s prose would not exist and he himself would be out of business.” And, Epstein remarks that in Steiner’s work “Things that are not iconic tend to canonic, and a vast number of things are ‘seminal.’ Steiner, one begins to feel after reading him for many years, greatly underrates the power of semen.” And, “My friend Edward Shils once gave me a most useful clue to the best way to read Steiner. He claimed that many years ago he read a splendid parody of Steiner’s of the way a Soviet apparatchik thought. Steiner, he felt, was a marvelous mimic. And so, I have come to see, he is. What George Steiner has been doing, over the past forty or so years, is an incomparable impression of the world’s most learned man.” Ba-rump-bump.

Speaking as one who has read Steiner with awe, enjoyment and profit, Epstein’s pricks hit their target. In my mind, Steiner is not wholly deflated, but as I read Epstein’s review I was sure I could hear the hissing sound of escaping air.

I can’t resist adding Epstein’s reflections on his own teaching career: “I recently closed down a university teaching career of thirty years, and I would like to go on record as saying that I wouldn’t have done it for a penny less. Teaching is arduous work, entailing much grinding detail and boring repetition — a teacher, it has been said, never says anything once ?Einterrupted only occasionally by moments of always surprising exultation. And I should like to add that I don’t think I learned a thing from my students, except that, as one student evaluation informed me, I tend to jingle the change in my pocket.”

Media: James Welch

There’s an intriguing review of the work of James Welch in the January 26 Weekly Standard. Welch, who died last year, was a Montana-based poet and novelist, known as an “Indian poet” and “Indian novelist” for his focus on the lives and history of American Indians. The interest of the article is not only its introduction to a (to me previously unknown) writer, but also the fact that this appears in the Weekly Standard at all. What other DC-based political journal would have an article on a Montana-based writer written by a newspaperman from Pierre, South Dakota. But this has become fairly normal for this journal. Weekly Standard Books and Culture editor Jody Bottum should be commended for consistently seeking to represent the WHOLE of American life and culture in his section of the magazine.

History Media Philosophy: Books and Culture Reviews

A potpourri of interesting reviews in Books & Culture:

1) Gerald McDermott reviews several recent evangelical books on Christianity’s relation to non-Christian religions. He is critical of attempts (Paul Heim, e.g.) to root a pluralist or inclusivist view of other religions in the doctrine of the Trinity, and also criticizes the tendency to shift from sin/alientation to knowledge as the crucial problem of humanity. McDermott is also aware, however, that the church’s confrontation in mission with non-Christian cultures is always a process of expansion and growth for the church as well.

2) Bruce Ellis Benson reviews Stanislas Breton’s The Word and the Cross. Breton is among a number of French phenomenologists who have turned toward theological and religious concerns in their philosophical work (Jean-Luc Marion is the best known of these). Breton’s book explores the connections of word, folly, and power in Christian faith, starting from Paul’s statements on the folly of the cross in 1 Cor. As Benson puts it, Paul’s words show that the “logic of the cross transcends BOTH Jerusalem and Athens, both the demand of a sign and the demand of giving reasons.” Pushing a rather radical kenotic Christology, Brenton claims that Christ has emptied Himself in a way that is never reversed, so that “Christ’s very identity” is “nothing.” That is to say, Christ is “nothing” with respect to the “empire of being” of this world; the “idol of power” is thus destroyed. As Benson points out, this is difficult to square with a strong doctrine of resurrection (though Benson suggests some ways Breton might work in an exaltation). And, I would add, I have my doubts that “kenosis” in Phil 2 is specifically about the incarnation anyway.

3) Paul Gutjahr reviews a recent collection of essays on Charles Hodge, emphasizing Hodge’s lifetime concern with the connections of theology and science.

4) Irving Hexham reviews a book on modern paganism by Ronald Hutton, which debunks myths of a witch-burning craze in medieval or early modern history, shows that the church frequently protected accused witches against, and shows that modern paganism is just that, modern. “Hutton shows, neopaganism is far more deeply rooted in MODERN culture than most people realize. According to his research, modern paganism began its complex development with the reaction of German romantics to the spiritually barren rationalism of the Enlightenment. From Germany the Romantic vision quickly spread to England, where numerous writers embraced it by idealizing either ancient Greece or the Middle ages in poetry and fiction.” In short, it all starts with Goethe.

Media: Archbishop Akinola

There’s a very moving piece on the Nigerian Anglican, Archbishop Peter Jasper Akinola in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly, written by Philip Jenkins. It’s wonderful to see how the Lord is raising up sturdy Christian leaders from the Southern Hemisphere to challenge the decadent churches of the North. One of the points Akinola makes is that the endorsement of homosexual practice will be an enormous boon to Islam in Nigeria. As Jenkins summarizes it, “If the Anglican Communion accepted gay bishops or approved gay unions, Muslims would gain an enormous propaganda victory in Nigeria — and in a dozen or so other African countries in which Christians and Muslims compete for converts, often violently. . . . At stake, [Akinola] believes, is the religious map of much of Africa, and the global balance between Christianity and Islam.”

This article is another of a string of surprises from the increasingly indispensable Atlantic Monthly, which still bears the mark of the late editor, Michael Kelly.

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