I may have scuffed the problem with Mouw's Upside of Consumerism, but Anthony Sacramone hit the nail on the head.

update: Although it's on a different subject, R.R. Reno's reply to correspondents in the current Commentary fits quite nicely with Sacramone:

There is nothing in breadth alone that necessarily conveys richness of character or experience. On the contrary, I am more and more inclined to think that it leads either to confusion or to a sophisticated superficiality. Richness of character is like that of color: it comes form depth and intensity.

Raising Sand

In a strategy successfully tried before by Nanci Griffith in Other Voices Other Rooms, the collaborative album Raising Sand leaves the songwriting to vintage American culture, and allows the singers to focus on interpretation. The piercing sweetness of Alison Krauss carries the album, and always seems to avoid the sentimentality to which Nanci Griffith is occasionally prone (think Love at the Five & Dime).

But the subduing of Robert Plant is the album's most curious feature. He comes out of the cage every once in a while with echoes of Led Zepellin vocals (towards the end of Gone Gone Gone), but it's Krauss who gets most of the attention. Negatively, the album can be seen as a battle of the sexes in which woman wins. Positively, it's a metaphor for a delightful, fun marriage; but one in which Plant has married up.

All in all, this is the perfect album with which to sucker your average Zeppelin-revering hipster into the more domesticated musical tastes appropriate for one's later twenties, thirties and beyond. Plant is the bait, but Krauss is the hook.

post-postmodernity popularized

Here's a clip to back up that last post. Though it doesn't show the part where the the professor attempts to deconstruct Marge's letter from Homer that says, "I MISS YOU," one still gets the idea.

update: Alas, looks like youtube has turned off the tap on this one, so I took the video down.


update: And it's back. Thanks to John for the heads up.

This is of regional concern, but the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal will be doing what they do - renewing - in Princeton all this week. Here's the schedule.

with Fox as my witness

The reason some of us get so annoyed when Christians play postmodern is not because we're afraid of it, or can't stand conversation, or are Calvinists, or have secretly erected an asherah pole to propositional truth - but simply because so much of the theory is dated. Most Christian audiences, not being in academia, don't realize this, which is why there's a great market for the stuff as the next hot thing. The objection to my opinion, I imagine, is that postmodernity may be passé in academia, but is just now trickling down to the popular level, and so it's still very necessary to engage.

But tonight's Simpsons episode, "That 90's Show," makes it painfully clear that it is actually the mocking of deconstruction that has trickled down to the popular level, from Terry Eagleton 2003 to Fox 2008. Perhaps the fact that the episode had to be set as a flashback makes the point all the more acutely.

In the meantime, I will continue to suggest that the best of deconstruction has long been in the Christian cards (consider point 2779), and will, in my better moments, pray for an emergence into orthodoxy without scare quotes.

Frank Gehry/Pope Benedict

Maybe not doppelgänger-close, but worth at least pointing out. The similarities, fortunately for Catholicism, stop there.

Speaking of which, thought Tony Blair was a big fish? How 'bout Shakespeare? Joseph Pearce makes a decent case for the Catholic Bard in his new book. I was initially skeptical of the thesis, as was Pearce before he started researching. The shoe fits nicely, however, with the new picture of English history emerging in the wake of Eamon Duffy's research.

An interview with Stephen Barr only confirmed my impression that he is one of the best thinkers on faith and science around (why have I not yet read his book?). And, nothing to stir the conscience like hearing the testimony of a saline abortion survivor during live coverage of the March for Life, which as far as the rest of the media is concerned, didn't seem to happen.

Why all this? I've been sick for a week, which forces me, book-burnt, to EWTN, the channel that approaches (but doesn't always realize) what religious broadcasting could be. Quit yer moaning about TBN folks and just change the channel (unless it's a Billy Graham classic), because Father John Corapi is the best T.V. preacher in America.

millinerd is experiencing technical difficulties, as it looks like my commenting system is fritzin' out. Apologies, but I can assure you I've already fired two staff persons for this.

update: All fixed it seems, with a fancy new ratings system to boot.

update: Ah, and just when it was all fixed, my domain name expired, and the world went millinerdless for two whole days. If you noticed the air a little bit colder, each child's visage a little less bright, if your true colors somehow weren't shining through, now you know why. But we're back.

Saved by the Colon

I've just seen Blood for Oil, the movie. I'm sorry, I meant There Will Be Blood. Revolving around "1911," it was extended confirmation of Hollywood's cherished fantasy that all big business (except, perhaps, movie-making) and all religion (except, perhaps, Scientology) are necessarily corrupt. Oscar? You can count on it. Why the cynicism? Guess you could say I caught it from the worldviews on offer in this years top films, and am just throwing back a little. Amidst such adulation, they can take it. Of course, much business and religion are corrupt, no argument there. But did I really need an oil tycoon didactically muttering "I hate people," and a minister publicly licking the arthritic fingers of an old lady to be so reminded? Of course I did.

Yes, the soundtrack was brilliant. But much depended upon Eli the screecher-preacher's acting, and hence much was lost. Eli was forgiven by critics, I suppose, because he was just one of many satellites orbiting in the solar system of which Daniel Day Lewis' acting was the blazing sun. I don't think it necessary to send up a spoiler alert flare to cite one line from the final scene, where the über-actor's character forces the preacher to say the twin propositions, "I am a false prophet," and "God is a superstition." (The less subtle equivalent to "I got here the same way the coin did" in No Country for Old Men.) What no one seems to realize is that the statements - together - are in no way problematic, granted one uses the proper punctuation. "I am a false prophet: God is a superstition."

Sibling premises to convey the same meaning would include, "I am not a false prophet: God is not a superstition," or better yet, "I am a true prophet: God is real."

No Country for Old Men

"It was the cognoscenti's last joyride after the death of God." That's how art critic Maureen Mullarkey describes deconstruction's heyday in 2008. Wait, make that 1998. Sorry, wrong again, 1988. Or was it '78 or '68? Ah, that's right. 1968.

She then connects Weiner's World (party time, excellent) to that joyride. When a catalog marries Weiner's conceptual art to hot theorists Baudrillard and Lacan, she invokes philosopher Roger Scruton, who

"once charged both with charlatanism. He called them impostors who abuse the terms of their disciplines 'to deceive the reader into thinking that they are thinking when in fact they are doing no such thing.'"

This leads to a question: Why is it that deconstruction historically received a colder reception in philosophical country than in the literature or art worlds? Philosophy professor Anthony Kenny (whose new book is reviewed in the current First Things) has an answer, and it's not snarky as much as it is straightforward. The fame of Derrida (et. al.), has prospered in art and literature departments because their members "have had less practice in discerning genuine from counterfeit philosophy."

Fortunately, the sterling discipline of theology is, like philosophy, able to detect any and all counterfeits. Right? Well, no. And perhaps that's why James K.A. Smith seems so concerned.

Voice of Dissent

"Modern architecture has become totally homogenized and uninteresting... One streetscape in Prague is worth all of Dubai, visually."

That quote from NYT coverage of traditional architecture enthusiast, Richard Driehaus, a man who has money and knows what to do with it: Provide a prize for traditional architecture, and enable it to be administered by a school that encourages such architecture, Notre Dame.

Combine this with the Frank Gehry lawsuit to get an overall picture of contemporary architecture's predicament.

Bigger stage, greater drama

Some Christians secretly nurse a suspicion that contemporary cosmology has found them out, confirming the culture of disbelief. As if Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who first broke the atomsphere to say, "I don't see God," was right. Apparently he didn't even say that. Kruschev did.

Contemporary cosmology - as Adam, a faithful Catholic and Princeton astronomist might tell you - is in fact a gift. Whether the Big Bang confirms creatio ex nihilo is an opinion to be held lightly (see Barr's response to Colson), but I'm thinking more of this: The boggling proportions of the known Universe robs us of a prematurely spatial limitation to God's whereabouts, one that more primitive cosmologies could encourage. "'Who art in heaven' does not mean a place ('space'), but a way of being," writes the Catechism of the Catholic Church, "Our Father is not 'elsewhere.'"

Objection to this teaching could come from claiming it is a contemporary adjustment of Christian doctrine to accommodate new science. And while carefully developing the faith in light of recent discoveries is not in principle wrong, in this case there is no need to. It's not as if the idea of God and his heaven being non-spatial is anything new. The fourth-century quotes from Augustine and Chrysostom in the Catechism following the above assertion (see 2794) convey the very same idea.

This is not to suggest that God and his heaven are less than spatial, but more. Of course, this is impossible to understand. Diogenes Allen recently related how Jesus appears in the film The Green Man to discuss some matters with a businessman. The man asks, "What's it like in Heaven?" Jesus - nearly annoyed - dismisses the question as an unwelcome distraction, offhandedly remarks, "You'd never understand," and steers the conversation back to what matters: the businessman's getting there.

It may stretch the modern mind to be asked to lay down the idol of space as the final frontier, but space isn't: God is. "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me," wrote Blaise Pascal. As I've remarked before, T.F. Torrance has provided the definitive reply: "Don't worry, that's how much God loves you."

Consumerism

A friend, Daryn, points to Richard Mouw's recent Christianity Today article, "Spiritual Consumerism's Upside," in which Mouw asks,

Why is [a Methodist or Charismatic parish-hop] decision a manifestation of consumerism while, say, the moves of Lutheran theologians - I have in mind Father Richard John Neuhaus and Jaroslav Pelikan - to enter into Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy are not?

Mouw's concern in asking the question is to avoid elitism.

The consumption of sermons and worship styles by an ordinary Christian family looking for an enriching spiritual life may not be all that different from the scholar's consumption of theologies and liturgies.

He appears to playfully connect that ordinary family with those choosing between Quarter Pounders and Whoppers, and scholars who convert to Orthodoxy or Catholicism with those distinguishing between two types of Cabernet Sauvignon. It's all spiritual consumerism, you see, and it's not all bad.

Being a longtime church-hopper, I have sympathy with Mouw's arguments, but not with his equating - however indirectly - Protestant denominational leapfrog to Catholic/Orthodox conversion. That's like suggesting a person who moves from Cuba to Hispaniola is in the same geographical situation as one who forsakes the Carribean entirely to reside in North or South America.

The moves are different, for starters, because - to use Mouw's wine analogy - age matters. The Big Two, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, are simply of older and better vintage. The moves are also different because there has long been more genuine diversity within Catholicism (and, to a lesser extent, within Orthodoxy) than outside of those communions. A Big Two conversion is a choice for more choices. But Mouw, a Seminary President, already knows this. The article concludes,

The Roman church, perhaps more than any other, has encouraged many different spiritual flowers to flourish in its ecclesial garden - indeed, it has even been willing to live with considerable structural (and ecclesiological) messiness...

I suppose that answers his original question as to what sets someone like Neuhaus apart.

Christian scholarship

Before Mark Noll, before George Marsden or Duane Litfin, there was, thankfully, at least someone who understood the urgent necessity for Christian scholarship:

Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?

That from Kierkegaard, who in lieu of another commentary on the New Testament, simply offered the confession that he was unable to meet its demands. Thanks to plough for the free book.