blog doctor?

Due to valued reader input, links are slowly being refurbished as I recover from the crash of 2006. And while many of you who drive fancy blogs may not have such troubles, if anyone knows how to put the dates back into my posts I would be grateful. I can't seem to pull it off even using the previous cached template.

In other news, seeing today is not only Halloween but "Reformation Day," allow me to register that William Dyrness is dead on about a direction in which Protestantism need move.

Rock the Vote

By carrying a camera to class the last month I've been able to produce the Princeton 2006 Fall Gallery. Should you wish to vote for your favorite by commenting below, the winner will make it into Greatest Hits.

Millinerd: where your input counts.

Eat your theory!

Cultural theory is to the humanities graduate student what spinach is to most children. They may not like it, but some will consume it to please superiors who insist it's good for them. I make the connection fully aware of spinach's recently tarnished reputation.

In light of this, I'm glad to have been notified thanks to verbumipsum of a very worthwhile article entitled Christ and Critical Theory. It's a nice primer from a kind and confident Christian thinker that I wish I had read it before I started my program.

Griffiths chronicles the more familiar faith-flirtations of Eagleton and Zizek, but unknown at least to me were similar trends in the thought of postmodern action heroes Jean François Lyotard and Alain Badiou. Commenting on Lyotard's engagment of St. Augustine, Griffiths explains that

"Lyotard (in his late work, at least) was driven by hunger for the illimitable jouissance made possible only by the différend more different than which none can be thought."

Or consider Badiou's late turn to the Apostle Paul:

"The sense of loss from which Badiou reads Paul is palpable. He needs 'a new militant figure... to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.' That figure (Badiou does not say but implies) is lost, frozen in the Gulag, crushed under the tracks of the Soviet tanks as they rolled into Prague, withered by the increasing willingness of China to accept capital's blandishments, and dismembered by the breakup of the Soviet Empire. This loss can, he hopes, be supplied by Paul, but only if Paul is disjoined from the fable that is Christianity..."

Perhaps one will notice here an intriguing parallel to the later inclinations of Foucault and Derrida.

No doubt Griffiths is correct that this is stuff to which Christians should be paying attention. He also rightly indicates that such "pagan yearning for Christian intellectual gold" does not reach the point of conversion for any of the aforementioned thinkers. But because conversion is a two-way street, in my more cynical moments I wonder if Christian yearning for pagan intellectual fool's gold will.

This interview is an unsettling reminder that once open, the doors of perception can be rather difficult to close (start listening at 9min 20sec). Earlier in the interview Manzarek talks to his left hand.

And in academic news, I wonder if this will spur any fresh proposals.

Dawkins Defanged

Are the arguments of atheist high priest Richard Dawkins worth spending time on? Not particularly. Should you yet feel compelled, David Quinn's debate with him on Irish radio has been making the rounds (download the Oct. 9th show here). Thanks to Ryan Anderson for the link.

The program starts at 7:57, Quinn arrives at 14:06. Good luck keeping track of all those accents

Even worse for Dawkins' position than exposure to Quinn however is plain sociology, which lately hasn't been able to provide much data to support the idea that evolution is destined to leave religion behind. Peter Berger has more on audio.

Highligh quote: "Max Weber is alive and well and llving in Guatelmala."

Defending the Departed

My co-religionist Jeffrey Overstreet this time gets it sadly wrong:

"Scorsese fails to give proper attention to the most admirable character of the bunch - Martin Sheen as Oliver Queenan, the chief of the Boston Police Department and a Catholic who is the film's most upright and principled man. And yet, Queenan is all but ignored, lost in the chaos of bullets and double-crossings."

The integrity of Sheen's character was, I submit, almost perfectly placed. The saturated corruption of church and state provided the necessary darkness that enabled the light of one decent Boston Catholic to emerge with dramatic chiaroscuro effect. To say Queenan was "lost in the bullets and double-crossings" is tantamount to saying that a beautiful painting is "lost in the wood and hardware" of its frame.

Hagiographical Hermeneutics

With a post title like that I need to be decked, but I hope you'll see it fits - "hagiography" being the lives of the Saints, and "hermeneutics" being how to interpret them.

In 1907, after using his keen historical mind to decimate the historicity of many a medieval Saints' Life, the famous Bollandist Hippolyte Deleheye pulled a last minute recovery job:

"Medieval legend as a whole (not each legend in particular) has something of that mysterious and sublime poetry which pervades our old cathedral buildings, it expresses the Christian feelings for an ideal of holiness with unexampled force... the bearing of their characters are stiff and stilted, the situations unbelievable. But the governing thought is lofty and fine: these writers keep their eyes fixed on that exalted beauty of which pagan antiquity knew nothing, the beauty of a soul decked in God's grace... " (e-text).

There being so much chaff in medieval vitae to be discarded, Deleheye's gesture to preserve some wheat is certainly appreciated.

But on the other hand, consider the preface to Theodoret's Life of Symeon Stylites, which although written in the 5th century both anticipates such modern historiography and challenges it:

"I am afraid that the narrative may seem to posterity to be a myth totally devoid of truth. For the facts surpass human nature, and men are wont to use nature to measure what is said; if anything is said that lies beyond the limits of nature, the account is judged to be false by those uninitiated into divine things. But since earth and sea are full of pious souls educated in divine things and instructed in the grace of the all-holy Spirit, who will not disbelieve what is said but have complete faith in it, I shall make my narration with eagerness and confidence (160).

So which is it? Give up hope for historical accuracy and settle for the abiding lesson with Deleheye, or stubbornly insist that the abiding lesson be anchored (and hence amplified) by historical truth? The postmodern temptation to surrender truth to meaning may seem transgressive, but in fact proves the tired point that postmodernity is hyper-modernity - leaving the materialist, historicist mindset essentially unprovoked. Much more exciting is, with Theodoret, to challenge the natural limits of history, and while wary of raw credulity, to nevertheless insist that historical possibility is a far from settled affair.

The catch is that the latter move only works for a selected audience, those "educated in divine things," i.e. the church. But if faith involves an epistemological expansion (as it most certainly does), how could things be otherwise?

Of course the ante is upped on all this when it comes to the interpretation of Scripture - where the options laid out here are very much the same - but that's another post.

link-loss

Astute millinerd readers will notice this blog has come down with a case of acute side-bar hemorrhage. Lest you think I conducted a Duffy-style stripping of the altars, please realize it was a mistake.

In adding someone to my sidebar (if you weren't linked to you can assume that was you), I accidentally deleted the entire template for this site, and then published it completely blank. Woops.

I was able to salvage my slaved-over template only thanks to the famed (2 avg. visitors per day) millinerd music site, but without all my links. (There's an analogy to ancient manuscript discoveries in there somewhere.) Building up the links took 3 years (we've been live since 2003), and the whole process of loss and recovery took about three minutes.

Apologies to those esteemed bloggers who are no longer linked to - I assure you I still check your sites, but I find this unintended Calvinist aesthetic refreshing. Additionally, a lot of what I linked to that was written when I was in Seminary I don't, at least in tone, entirely agree with. Nothing clears the head like not being in Seminary, a statement which should be read as a muffled compliment to the clear-headed Seminarians out there.

In other news, the Erasmus Lecture yesterday was quite good. Philip Jenkins' familiar thesis was explored in depth, and in short, Africa is not the future of Christianity. It is Christianity, and using our divided northern theological categories to understand them is, fortunately, ineffective. You might get the gist of it here.

Why Al Gore hates the NRSV

This morning, according to the Episcopal lectionary, we humans saw our lust for earth-domination biblically confirmed. What's more, Christians have been granted permission to subjugate even other people, and, believe it or not, "nothing will be outside our control." Muwwaaaa... The Nietzchean lust for power that movies like Little Miss Sunshine did so much to cleverly subvert has now been confirmed by the Scriptures themselves!

How? Read for yourself - the Bible... scratch that, the gender neutral NRSV, told us so. This morning's passage from Hebrews quotes Psalm 8 with Christ in mind, but the need to render the Psalm in the plural for gender inclusive purposes both sacrifices Christological prophecy to the age of the waitron, and - the best part - gives what the author of Hebrews intended Crist to have directly to us! Behold the NRSV's rendering of Hebrews 2:5-9:

"Now God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels. But someone has testified somewhere,

'What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals, that you care for them? You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor, subjecting all things under their feet.'

Now in subjecting all things to them, God left nothing outside their control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone."

Notice how gendered Jesus shows up, rather inexplicably, just in time to give us a little encouragement as we wait for the day when "all things will be subjected" under not his, but our feet. If you think about it, a legitimate reading of this tranlsation could argue that earth, others, and yes, even Christ will be subjected to us. Inclusion - what a rush.

Warning: Other translations were a total buzzkill to my powerhigh. So glad my congragation abruptly switched ot the NRSV.

In the meantime, look out earth - I'm going shopping.

I'm giving a talk on icons at the Princeton University Art Museum this Sunday (10/8) at 3pm should anyone wish to attend. Admission is free.

free teaching trick

And yet another difference between the first avant-garde and its more recent manifestations, is that the former actually were willing to die. The other? Not so much.

But about that teaching trick... I'm precepting (a.k.a. "TA"ing) this semester for an intro art history class, and at the session covering bibliographical resources, I underscored why internet sites are not suitable for formal research by altering a wikipedia file on the internet display in class, and then pulling up the site again with the incorrect information.

Of course I changed it back, but the point seemed to get taken.