In her New York Times column "Surrender, Dorothy," Maureen Dowd threw out a word that *moi* was not familiar with: ensorcell. It was used to describe Barack Obama. I thought it might have something to do with sorcery and, in fact, it does. It means to enchant or bewitch.
I have been enjoying reading the New York Times on line because I find the site easy to navigate. It's also updated frequently. It's fast, I'm very seldom annoyed by pesky pop-up advertisements and the headlines are great. It still doesn't offer the same convenience as print ... which for me is the ability to scan a page of articles very quickly, but it's helping me cope with cyberspace.
Anyway, all that being said, I read a piece today in the Times that I imagine was supposed to be witty and tongue-in-cheek, but it came across, at least to *moi*, as nasty. It reminded me of the old days, when the Washington Post would regularly go over the top in cattiness. The Post has made great strides in recent years at civility ... and of course, they publish *moi*, so now I am very fond of them.
However, I digress. The article was about dating and reading and all the people in New York City who have dumped each other over reading. New Yorkers are a finicky bunch. If you've never heard of your date's favorite author, you're out. If your reading tastes are deemed too middlebrow (say, John Irving), you're out. But if you carry a book that seems to scream pretension, you're also out. And if your taste doesn't match your date's perfectly-- for instance, horrors, if you actually like Virginia Woolf, you're out.
Well, we all have our middlebrow reading tastes (I'm reading the Golden Compass trilogy, right now, which probably doesn't even qualify as middlebrow) and we all love authors our friends love to hate. I hope we book lovers are a little more generous, good humored and down to earth than The Times makes us out to be.
I love Nancy Drew as well as Jane Austen. I can also enjoy a good middlebrow adult mystery and some contemporary "highbrow" literary fiction leaves me cold. Are there politically incorrect books you like? Enscorcell me.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Missional churches
I found a link to this good blog entry on the Jesus Creed site:
spearszacharias.bravejournal.com/entry/25840/
This describes the emerging church in a nutshell. And reminds me of the early Quakers ... Why don't Quakers do this more?
spearszacharias.bravejournal.com/entry/25840/
This describes the emerging church in a nutshell. And reminds me of the early Quakers ... Why don't Quakers do this more?
Friday, March 28, 2008
Nostalgic or Homesick?
I read the following in Christian Century, quoted from Susan J. Matt writing in the Sept. '07 Journal of American History:
"Homesickness is longing for a lost place and nostalgia is longing for a lost time."
I have often experienced longing for a lost place and have thought to myself that I am unheimlich, or out of place, without a home. In very recent years, that feeling has receded. As I've grown older, I've recognized that the place I long for doesn't really exist, at least not in any sustained way. I've simply caught glimpses of it, or experienced fragments of it, the little pieces of the Kingdom of God that have penetrated into our world, often in unlikely places and like oases surrounded by oceans of desert.
I associate Kingdom of God with my early childhood, with a place nobody would mistake for Paradise. And with a high-ceiling, dilapidated apartment I shared with a roommate my senior year of college. I think we expend a great deal of effort trying to recapture our KOG moments, to recreate and refashion them. For example, I wanted to share the English Lake District with my family, in part because of a morning there in a youth hostel's kitchen experiencing a deeply-felt moment of peace and well-being as sunlight (an weather phenomenon to be cherished in England!) came in through windows that lined three sides of the big room.
We make pilgrimages to places that have such layers of holiness that we feel the presence of the Kingdom of God. We bask in that peace. I think it is sad that in our present day, we are so prone to want to tear down and rebuild anything more than 20 years old. It takes time for sacred spaces to emerge. And we need to be able to go back, reconnect with our homes.
Do you have places that especially touch you?
"Homesickness is longing for a lost place and nostalgia is longing for a lost time."
I have often experienced longing for a lost place and have thought to myself that I am unheimlich, or out of place, without a home. In very recent years, that feeling has receded. As I've grown older, I've recognized that the place I long for doesn't really exist, at least not in any sustained way. I've simply caught glimpses of it, or experienced fragments of it, the little pieces of the Kingdom of God that have penetrated into our world, often in unlikely places and like oases surrounded by oceans of desert.
I associate Kingdom of God with my early childhood, with a place nobody would mistake for Paradise. And with a high-ceiling, dilapidated apartment I shared with a roommate my senior year of college. I think we expend a great deal of effort trying to recapture our KOG moments, to recreate and refashion them. For example, I wanted to share the English Lake District with my family, in part because of a morning there in a youth hostel's kitchen experiencing a deeply-felt moment of peace and well-being as sunlight (an weather phenomenon to be cherished in England!) came in through windows that lined three sides of the big room.
We make pilgrimages to places that have such layers of holiness that we feel the presence of the Kingdom of God. We bask in that peace. I think it is sad that in our present day, we are so prone to want to tear down and rebuild anything more than 20 years old. It takes time for sacred spaces to emerge. And we need to be able to go back, reconnect with our homes.
Do you have places that especially touch you?
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Golden Compass Books: The Subtle Knife
The Subtle Knife is book two in the Golden Compass trilogy. The plot is complicated, so I will boil it down to a few essentials: a boy named Will from goes in search of his missing explorer father. As he does so, he discovers a window into a parallel universe. He enters, finds a depopulated city and meets Lyra, who has also entered this world from another. (We remember her as the girl heroine of the first book.) Will and Lyra have a series of adventures as Will searches for his father and Lyra pursues the secret of the mysterious Dust (consciousness) that is of grave concern to the Church in her world. In the midst of their travels between parallel universes, Will and Lyra enter a tower where Will fights for what turns out to be the "subtle knife." This is an extraordinary weapon that can slice through any metal. It also can cut windows between the universes. As the bearer of the knife, Will wields great power.
In this volume, we get more hints that the Church from Lyra's world is evil. While this church is not the Roman Catholic Church (this is after all a different universe) the parallels are obvious. There is no pope, but there is an inquisition and highly centralized control through a Magisterium and various councils. This Church, which worships The Authority (what we would call God) is preoccupied with eradicating sin, which it associates with Dust (consciousness). It will go to any lengths to rid its world of sin. What it identifies as sin are attributes such as free will, freedom, thought, transparency and individual growth and empowerment. In fact, the Church demonstrates that it is willing to rob people of their humanity and turn them into mindless zombies if this is what it takes to eradicate sin.
Clearly, the real Roman Catholic church has had problems with abuse of power. It's an easy target because its failings have been so glaring. But the novel suppresses all the good done by Catholicism in order to paint the institution as wholly evil. We never see this parallel church feeding the poor, caring for the dying, helping the handicapped, speaking out for the oppressed in Third World countries, calling for world peace or the abolition of the death penalty or any of the wonderful works that the Catholic Church has and is currently doing. Of course, you may say, this a work of fiction and the author can do what he wishes with his church in a parallel universe, but the distortion bothers me. I fear it plays on the kind of unexamined cultural assumptions (such as religion painted as the impediment to freedom and progress) that we explored in the Galileo series. I fear that the young people reading these books will buy into a distortion and become unduly hostile to an institution and faith that, like humans themselves, is imperfect but not evil. And this bothers me, in large part because it's so insidious.
Why is there such a focus on what is bad in Catholicism? What do you think?
In this volume, we get more hints that the Church from Lyra's world is evil. While this church is not the Roman Catholic Church (this is after all a different universe) the parallels are obvious. There is no pope, but there is an inquisition and highly centralized control through a Magisterium and various councils. This Church, which worships The Authority (what we would call God) is preoccupied with eradicating sin, which it associates with Dust (consciousness). It will go to any lengths to rid its world of sin. What it identifies as sin are attributes such as free will, freedom, thought, transparency and individual growth and empowerment. In fact, the Church demonstrates that it is willing to rob people of their humanity and turn them into mindless zombies if this is what it takes to eradicate sin.
Clearly, the real Roman Catholic church has had problems with abuse of power. It's an easy target because its failings have been so glaring. But the novel suppresses all the good done by Catholicism in order to paint the institution as wholly evil. We never see this parallel church feeding the poor, caring for the dying, helping the handicapped, speaking out for the oppressed in Third World countries, calling for world peace or the abolition of the death penalty or any of the wonderful works that the Catholic Church has and is currently doing. Of course, you may say, this a work of fiction and the author can do what he wishes with his church in a parallel universe, but the distortion bothers me. I fear it plays on the kind of unexamined cultural assumptions (such as religion painted as the impediment to freedom and progress) that we explored in the Galileo series. I fear that the young people reading these books will buy into a distortion and become unduly hostile to an institution and faith that, like humans themselves, is imperfect but not evil. And this bothers me, in large part because it's so insidious.
Why is there such a focus on what is bad in Catholicism? What do you think?
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Children of the Light
"For you are children of the light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness." 1 Thess. 5:5
A Quakerly verse. I remember perhaps two years ago taking a walk on a June evening with my family. As we approached the house, we realized that our section of the neighborhood was in the middle of a power outage. By the time we got in the front door, night had arrived. Inside the house, it was dark in a way we are not used to experiencing. Not only were we without indoor light, there was no light from nearby houses. We sat around a taper that illuminated part of our coffee table. To walk anywhere in the house we had to carry this candle. Our house was a little scary, because if you moved unaided by the light, you could stumble over something, run into something, get hurt. To stay in the light, you had to stay close to the light.
As we sat in near darkness huddled around the candle, I thought (of course!) of Biblical metaphors of the light. People in earlier times must have had a more immediate understanding of the danger of straying away from sources of illumination. They must have realized too, that you couldn't stand in a dark corner of a room and say "I'm in the light." Have we, I wondered, lost the power --and the multilayeredness-- of that imagery in our artificially lit world?
In the above letter, written by Paul between the years 48 and 54, the light is Jesus. But why does he address his audience as children? Is it more than simply a rebirth image? What has been illuminated for them? Why would Quakers pick up on this verse?
A Quakerly verse. I remember perhaps two years ago taking a walk on a June evening with my family. As we approached the house, we realized that our section of the neighborhood was in the middle of a power outage. By the time we got in the front door, night had arrived. Inside the house, it was dark in a way we are not used to experiencing. Not only were we without indoor light, there was no light from nearby houses. We sat around a taper that illuminated part of our coffee table. To walk anywhere in the house we had to carry this candle. Our house was a little scary, because if you moved unaided by the light, you could stumble over something, run into something, get hurt. To stay in the light, you had to stay close to the light.
As we sat in near darkness huddled around the candle, I thought (of course!) of Biblical metaphors of the light. People in earlier times must have had a more immediate understanding of the danger of straying away from sources of illumination. They must have realized too, that you couldn't stand in a dark corner of a room and say "I'm in the light." Have we, I wondered, lost the power --and the multilayeredness-- of that imagery in our artificially lit world?
In the above letter, written by Paul between the years 48 and 54, the light is Jesus. But why does he address his audience as children? Is it more than simply a rebirth image? What has been illuminated for them? Why would Quakers pick up on this verse?
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Golden Compass Books
Because Sophie, my daughter, has been interested in Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass trilogy, I have been reading these books and they are raising some concerns with me. I am in the middle of the third book.
In the first book, we meet a young girl named Lyra, who is growing up in Oxford in a similar, but alternate, universe. Her world is charming in an old fashioned way: there are no computers, no movies and people travel by boat and zeppelin. Everybody is accompanied by a daemon, an animal which is apparently a manifestation of each person's soul and personality and is never far from the individual to whom it is attached. With children, the daemons are constantly shifting, one moment a mouse, then a lion, then a butterfly, etc. For adults, whose souls and personalities are fixed, the daemon is fixed too.
In the first book, Lyra is reunited with the mother she has never known, but soon finds that her mother, a representative of the Church, is an evil women involved in an experiment that involves cutting children away from their daemons, which renders the children zombielike and lifeless. Lyra has been given a golden compass that she is gifted to read. The compass gyrates around between symbols and answers questions for her to give her guidance. Lyra escapes her mother and travels north to the artic regions, to liberate her friend Roger from the remote locale where the daemon removal is taking place. She rescues him with the help of an intelligent armored bear, gypsies and witches and then finds her father, who has discovered a way to blast a hole in space so as to enter another universe. She follows him there. Lyra, the Church, and her father are all in pursuit of a mysterious substance called Dust. The Church equates it with sin and wants to eradicate it.
The books are well-written, with fast-paced, active plots and well-developed characters. They've won awards. Yet as I mentioned above, they make me uneasy. Have other people read them and have opinions? Tomorrow I will talk about book II and some of my unease.
In the first book, we meet a young girl named Lyra, who is growing up in Oxford in a similar, but alternate, universe. Her world is charming in an old fashioned way: there are no computers, no movies and people travel by boat and zeppelin. Everybody is accompanied by a daemon, an animal which is apparently a manifestation of each person's soul and personality and is never far from the individual to whom it is attached. With children, the daemons are constantly shifting, one moment a mouse, then a lion, then a butterfly, etc. For adults, whose souls and personalities are fixed, the daemon is fixed too.
In the first book, Lyra is reunited with the mother she has never known, but soon finds that her mother, a representative of the Church, is an evil women involved in an experiment that involves cutting children away from their daemons, which renders the children zombielike and lifeless. Lyra has been given a golden compass that she is gifted to read. The compass gyrates around between symbols and answers questions for her to give her guidance. Lyra escapes her mother and travels north to the artic regions, to liberate her friend Roger from the remote locale where the daemon removal is taking place. She rescues him with the help of an intelligent armored bear, gypsies and witches and then finds her father, who has discovered a way to blast a hole in space so as to enter another universe. She follows him there. Lyra, the Church, and her father are all in pursuit of a mysterious substance called Dust. The Church equates it with sin and wants to eradicate it.
The books are well-written, with fast-paced, active plots and well-developed characters. They've won awards. Yet as I mentioned above, they make me uneasy. Have other people read them and have opinions? Tomorrow I will talk about book II and some of my unease.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Easter Monday
We got back Saturday evening from our trip to Barnesville, Ohio. Sunday (and this morning) I was unable to access this blog but now I believe I have the problem solved. (HT:Roger)
In meeting for worship yesterday, my mind was filled with theologian N.T. Wright's assertion that Jesus' words on the cross were so unprecedented that the gospel accounts of his death must be true. Martyrs were common during the period of Roman Empire, but normally, according to Wright, a martyr would spend his last suffering minutes (or hours) calling down curses on his oppressors and prophesying their doom. It was a language of unfettered vengeance, part of a back-and-forth set piece of power and domination. In contrast, Jesus calls out to God to forgive his tormentors, and further, states that they don't understand what they're doing. This a stunning, radical shift in a martyr's relationship to his enemies. Jesus refuses to speak their language or to participate in their world view. Instead, he responds to them with forgiveness. Dying, he works to end the cycle of vengeance and violence with love, profound peacemaking and compassionate understanding of the other.
Wright makes clear that Jesus not only speaks a language of love, peace and forgiveness, he enacts it. This is what happens on the cross, as Jesus stands in for Israel and models for them a new path.
In meeting for worship yesterday, my mind was filled with theologian N.T. Wright's assertion that Jesus' words on the cross were so unprecedented that the gospel accounts of his death must be true. Martyrs were common during the period of Roman Empire, but normally, according to Wright, a martyr would spend his last suffering minutes (or hours) calling down curses on his oppressors and prophesying their doom. It was a language of unfettered vengeance, part of a back-and-forth set piece of power and domination. In contrast, Jesus calls out to God to forgive his tormentors, and further, states that they don't understand what they're doing. This a stunning, radical shift in a martyr's relationship to his enemies. Jesus refuses to speak their language or to participate in their world view. Instead, he responds to them with forgiveness. Dying, he works to end the cycle of vengeance and violence with love, profound peacemaking and compassionate understanding of the other.
Wright makes clear that Jesus not only speaks a language of love, peace and forgiveness, he enacts it. This is what happens on the cross, as Jesus stands in for Israel and models for them a new path.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)