And Ginsberg Cringed

"Class merge" occurs when courses one is taking enjoy a serendipitous conflation. One of the best examples of it in my recent memory came this term, when after a Modern Art lecture on the 20th century's "Three Avant-Gardes" (Schapiro, Greenberg, and Bürger), I immediately picked up the reading for another course I'm taking on Byzantine Monasticism. The assignment was entitled, "The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire."

Early desert monks are the kind of radicals that would make Allen Ginsburg blush. Men who spent their wedding nights convincing their wives to not consummate the marriage that they might both become ascetics; who would confess to crimes they didn't commit for the sheer humiliation; who would happily counsel those who came to them spewing insults, but would turn away all who esteemed them as wise; who to repent for killing a mosquito in anger, went to a land where they could bore buffaloes, returning so swollen as to be unrecognizable. Such acrobatics (no doubt with added literary flair) were engaged in not due to poor self-esteem, but to avoid being compromised by the recently legalized, and hence potentially compromised, Christianity - for a socially accepted faith made it ever more possible to shirk the duty to "take up your cross and follow me."

Rather than demonizing the bourgeoisie, these monks demonized demons, and saw the real battle to be primarily not with the decadence of the leisure class, but with their own. It's a reminder that Paul Gauguin wasn't the only one who left tidy financial sector employment in search of higher things.

Foucault vs. Foucault

Many Christians get their postmodern theory filtered through a friendly neighborhood progressive theology professor. The straight drink however is best imbibed from the native distillery - the graduate seminar room of selected University humanities departments.

Therein Freud, that dreaded foe of faith, might theoretically be appealed to by a Christian to defend the now scorned concept of self in face of its detractors. The anti-Christian Marx might prove to be a believer's uncanny ally, for in contrast to those who deny the category completely, at least Marx believed in history. Likewise humanism, once billed as faith's hostile competitor, in the face of post-humanism appears one of Christianity's newfound, and much needed, friends.

Which is why this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education is so interesting:

"He has been venerated and canonized as the messiah of French antihumanism: a harsh critic of the Enlightenment, a dedicated foe of liberalism's covert normalizing tendencies, an intrepid prophet of the 'death of man.'

But increasingly that perception seems wrong, or, at best, only partially true. Considerable evidence suggests that, later in life, Foucault himself became frustrated with the antihumanist credo. He came to realize that much of what French structuralism had during the 1960s rejected as humanist pap retained considerable ethical and political value."

The book under discussion, Foucault 2.0, seems reminiscent of Oliver Davie's suggestion, based on his later work, that

"Derrida is aware (more than Deleuze, for instance) that the very negativity which defines his semantic philosophy also offers a potential reappropriation of his deconstruction back into the reconstructive ontotheologies to which he declared himself opposed. Having been banished to the very margins of contemporary intellectual life, the deus absconditus might redefine that margin as the new epi-centre of a metaphysical/postmetaphysical re-enactment of traditional theism"(124).

Foucault the humanist? Derrida the traditional theist? The early Foucault and Derrida undone by none other than the later Foucault and Derrida? Friends, it just might be.

The Outbox

Not that you need another blog to read, but I know several of these contributors personally, each of whom are trustworthy, sharp and worth listening to - adjectives rarely associated with Mainline Protestantism.

In lieu of leaving, The Outbox (and the fellowship it represents) is poised to offer a spoonful of missional medicine for the bedridden PC(USA).

Open wide.

Jean-Luc Marion will ___ here.

Famous, fashionable... French! Philosopher/theologian Jean-Luc Marion has it all, and __ giving talks in Princeton on Sept. 25th - 29th. Prepare yourself by purging your language of the unacceptable.

Here ___ the details.


"Contributions to a Phenomenology of the Invisible:
Revelation, Trinity, God"

Monday, September 25, 2006, 4:30 p.m.
"Saturated Phenomena and Revelation"
McCosh 4

Tuesday, September 26, 2006, 4:30 p.m.
"The Other and the Third: From Intersubjectivity
to the Trinity"
101 McCormick Hall

Friday, September 29, 2006, 4:00 p.m.
"The Impossible: the Name of God"
101 McCormick Hall

Big Wednesday

I have an article on my pet subject in the latest issue of Princeton's "Revisions" journal. Please feel free to check it out.

In other news... you thought it was just a movie? Scroll down on Magic Seaweed's forecast. 7.5 foot clean waves on Wednesday at 3am begs for a headlight-lit session inspired by Point Break.

Hurricane leftovers

I've spent a good bit of time on the Jersey shore, and never have I seen surfing conditions as perfect as they were this Sunday. More pics here.

I went the next day when the waves were just as beautiful but a little more merciful. I forgot how much it helps to be in shape.

While wave-waiting I considered these semi-sentimental but nevertheless insightful reflections by Peter Kreeft who provides a Christian variant to the karmic-pantheism of surf-culture: The sea as icon of God.

UPDATE: For better pics, an article on the storm, and even the suggestion that "Ernesto" afforded fleeting reconciliation between bennies (a.k.a. shoobies) and locals - read this.