Blog Post (card, that is)

San Giorgio Maggiore
Originally uploaded by millinerd

No wonder Venetian artists revolutionized painting - they had an unbeatable home court advantage.

Briefcasing through Europe

Because I chose my undergraduate major wisely, I'll be spending Easter in Italy for dissertation research. Don't hate me. Better yet, join me. My round trip open jaw ticket (into Venice and out of Rome) was, taxes and fees included, $415.

Gone are the carefree days of backpacking in Europe as captured by Michener's The Drifters. The system is now such that I'm not sure how a contemporary carefree wanderer could see much of anything. The pattern is an Athonite one: In the sixties, hippies crashed Mount Athos and took advantage of monastic hospitality, an abuse which lead to the diamoniterion process which requires (thanks to Takis' cigarette breaks) nearly a dozen calls to Greece. Italy's reservation process is similar, meaning my trip now resembles a tight daily regimen in (what's left of) corporate America. The briefcase, not the backpack, seems the appropriate accessory.

First, consider the extensive preparation required. Beyond the Renaissance art texts, there is the essential travel book cocktail: One part Blue Guide (art historical), one part Pilgrim's Guide (devotional) mixed into a generous serving of the trusty Rick Steves (practical). John Ruskin's Stones of Venice can be used as well, granted it's concealed in a hip flask.

Then consider the trip itself: Two and a half days in Venice are jam packed - the more disciplined my sight seeing, the better the chance of a trip through the lagoon to the Byzantine mosaics of Torcello. Then, after picking up a car I've made a reservation to the minute at Padua's Arena Chapel, after which I'll pull into Ravenna just before the sights close. Here's the next day in Florence:

8:15am - Bargello Museum
9am - See Masaccio's Trinity at Santa Maria Novella
10am - San Marco Museum
12pm - Accademia
2pm - Uffizi
?pm - Get kicked out of the Ufizzi

Considering advance reservations are required for many of those, the casual traveler is at significant disadvantage. The next day in Florence takes me to the Duomo and the Brancacci Chapel (more reservations). Then it's off to Siena before the sights close, and the next day I hope to pull the threefer - Arezzo, Orvieto and Assisi. Impossible? We'll find out. I'm moving fast because I'm eager to get to Holy Week in Rome (where several more reservations have been necessary). While I'm quite proud of my prep-work, I could have done better. Had I been on the ball months ago, I would possibly have made it to the Scavi, which is now only a remote possibility.

This kind of detailed scheduling demands that a briefcase (or tasteful manpurse - it can be done) replace the backpack, and sleek eurojacket outerwear replace the casual fleece, but I'm okay with that. As anyone familiar with the Italian chapters of the Sartorialist will know, upping one's garment game when in Italy is not exactly a bad idea.

Expect a few interspersed Italian blog bursts over the next two weeks.

Condom Sense

However it might dull the zing of their prose, I suppose this article means that those who pointed out that "Benedict is wrong on condoms" should amend their statements to "Benedict and the Harvard School of Public Health are wrong on condoms." Or better yet, "Benedict, the Harvard School of Public Health, and all world Christendom before 1930 (including Luther and Calvin) are wrong on condoms."

Likewise, those who insist overpopulation is the problem need lay off the microfilm and pick up a current newspaper.

stay tuned

Pardon me if things are a little choppy here at millinerd for a bit. I'm working out some technical kinks. But if I go prepare a new internet place for you (at the same web address), I will come back again.

update: It seems switching webhosts was less eventful than I expected.

Cake Clouds Birthday

Here's Chuck Colson, in the current CT, with an important reminder:

Since our doctrines are truth claims, they cannot be mere symbolism. This is important to remember as we celebrate the Resurrection, which is often clouded by the pageantry of Easter.

While I couldn't agree more about doctrine, I'm moved to ask how the surviving head of Evangelicals and Catholics Together can still go on saying that pageantry "clouds" doctrine. How about "elucidates" or "amplifies"? There are few better than Thomas Howard to explain the alternative (in fact, the normative) "both/and" approach:

Certainly words constitute the articulating par excellence of that which is true... [Yet] we humans, as opposed to the dogs and the crows, will mark our awareness of significance in a visible, external, and concrete way. And, more than this our marking of significance seems to take on a formal - even a ritual and ceremonial - shape. That is, rather than simply leaving things with spontaneous exclamations of joy and congratulation, we all reach for the ritual (that is, precast text) of "Happy Birthday to You!" Somehow, oddly, this hackneyed and not especially impressive ditty, precisely because it is traditional, takes up our interior responses to the event, gives them an external shape, and thereby satisfies something in us that springs from the deepest mysteries of our humanness.

It is we who do this, and we suspect that the oddity belongs to our humanity itself. We are ritual creatures. We are ceremonial creatures. We give concrete shape to that which wells up in our innermost being... This oddity, of words finding embodiment in gesture and concrete form, is not simply convenient: it is inevitable. (26, 23, 25).

Suggested discussion topic for the next ECT meeting: Liturgy.

Conversation Stoppers for Overeducated Evangelicals

1. Yeah, I never really got that into the Narnia series.

2. Flannery O'Connor is overrated.

3. I was actually hoping global warming would hasten the eschaton.

4. Of course we should free Mumia - with the gospel.

5. But weren't the Crusades a response to Islamic aggression?

6. Christendom? Count me in!

7. I'm not sure Anglicanism is working for me.

8. Sure you can filch patristic milk for a while, but you should buy the cow eventually.

9. Did you ever get the sense that more of us should have become pastors or missionaries?

10. Hello! [contains too much hell]

11. NEW! While it's the early Kinkade that most moves me, I'm convinced the best is yet to come.

Building for Humans

Pomo types with an aversion to philosophical modernity might consider transferring their suspicion to architectural modernism as well. This is difficult, because it's not nearly as cool to dislike modernist aesthetics; but for those wishing to press forward nonetheless, I hope to assist you with an article about architectural modernism called "Building for Humans" in the current Christian Century. It's in ye olde printed medium, so ye will have to go the "library" or "newstand" to read it. My beef is not with modernism per se, which no doubt can be beautiful - but with ecclesial modernism, and my ideas are mostly gleaned from Bess and Glazer. Matthew Alderman (of the shrine) was kind enough to offer some of his deliciously non-modern designs for the piece.

update: This article is now available on beliefnet.

Avant L'Avant Garde

Renegade band subverts "the system" by offering a free album? Kudos Radiohead, but the idea is three decades old.

"In 1979, after negotiating a release from his contract with Sparrow, Keith Green initiated a new policy of refusing to charge money for concerts or albums. Keith and Melody mortgaged their home to privately finance Green's next album, So You Wanna Go Back To Egypt. The album, which featured a guest appearance by Bob Dylan, was offered through mail-order and at concerts for a price determined by the purchaser" (wiki).

A key difference, of course, is that at the time of their magnanimity (which included concerts), Keith and Melody Green did not have a comfortable system-generated fortune to fall back on.

Of course, the brightest of self-professed revolutionaries can't help but realize they're more than fashionably late to the barricades. Pomo darling Georges Bataille, for example, pointed to the early Christian movement as a model which could prevent the perpetual compromising of the avant-garde. According to the New Left Review,

...in a lecture given before the Collège on March 19, 1938, Bataille proposed the primitive Christian sect as the exemplum of such a cell - one that had, in fact, revolutionized the world.

Granted Bataille had long renounced his Catholic faith and tried to revive a (now defunct) atheistic mysticism, but at least he was honest about the origins of genuine resistance.

Even more honest was Hugo Ball, who very much like one Salvador Dalí, abandoned the Dada movement that he so ardently co-founded, returning by 1920 with his wife Emmy to the Catholicism of Ball's youth. Hear the words of one of the twentieth century's most venerated subversives:

I have broken the oath of allegiance I once gave to the church. Of course, I was a child when I received the holy confirmation, but it was a special appeal to my judgment and self-preservation. Now I am seeking my way back to the church and a life full of mistakes lies between us (186).

And so Ball's resistance really began. Christianity: When you're serious enough about revolution to get metaphysical.

son of millinerd

The North American Churches group blog is getting steamy.

Forever Learning

Inhellectual
Originally uploaded by millinerd

Also on that recent trip to the Met, I got a better closeup shot of the inhellectual (with accompanying graduate students), which will serve as my Lenten post until I find time for something more.