Old Guard

Old Guard
Originally uploaded by millinerd

To critique my own generation - not idolize another - I'll post this photograph from Princeton reunions this weekend along with a pertinent quotation from Kevin DeYoung's book, Just Do Something.

"Compared with my affluent, lazy, trivial, tinkering generation, my grandpa would be a remarkable man, except that so many from his generation seem to have been so remarkable. He had his faults, to be sure, but Grandpa Van, like most of the WWII crowd, certainly did something rather than nothing. He worked hard, took chances, showed constant initiative, and, by his own account, lived a pretty fulfilled life - all without searching desperately for fulfillment. He prayed, but didn't hyper-spiritualize his every move. He had several different jobs, but never in hopes of finding the next best thing.

More importantly, growing up in the Depression, he expected little from life, so when he got little he wasn't surprised, and when he got a lot, he chalked it up to God's doing, not his. I sense from talking to my grandpa that he labored hard at everything except trying to discern some mysterious, hidden will of direction from God. Not that he doesn't believe in God's providence. Far from it. But the providence he believed helped him take chances instead of taking breaks."

Much of DeYoung's effectiveness comes from his going to an older generation for wisdom, not his own.

Prodigal Son Sociology

I've been having some interesting conversations with friends at my career stage - what I like to call the academic in heat - about life decisions. We discussed the conflict between the Creative Class and Bowling Alone - between Richard Florida and Robert Putnam. Which is best?

In his address entitled Christianity and the Creative Age, Tim Keller seems to have answered the question for me, at least enough for me to stop worrying about it enough to get on with the important part: Living it.

For Keller, Florida's Creative Class (bohemians) and Putnam's close knit communities (bourgeois) can both become idolatrous. An urban artiste's (perhaps unintentional) idolization of the value of creativity, mobility and fluidity can lead to rootless vacuity, a condition that also threatens cities who put all their eggs in the creative class basket. Conversely, the hometown lifer's (perhaps unintentional) idolization of social capital and tribal loyalties can lead to cultural sterility or xenophobic traditionalism. Keller encapsulates these poles with the parable of the Prodigal Son. The son who left is Florida's Creative Class; the Son who stayed is Putnam's rooted community - but they both missed the point.

David Brooks' frightening BoBos take the worst of both possibilities: the amorality of the bohemian and the materialism of the bourgeois. Keller instead proposes that the Christian should take the best of both: the openness and creativity of Florida, grounded in the social capital and accountability that churches can provide. This could lead to thick, long-term communities even within a hip urban setting, or vibrant street life and creativity even in a small hometown.

Keller's is an interesting proposition. Perhaps a bit of an oversimplification, but I don't think anyone would dispute that it's worth $2.50 (the price of the mp3). It might especially be of interest to the kind of grassroots conservatism going on at the Front Porch Republic.

I was a teenage evangelical

And, truth be told, still am an evangelical. It's a marvelous inheritance, but one of the side-effects - immediately recognizable to fellow evangelicals and perhaps opaque to outsiders - is the dreaded question of "God's will for my life." I have spent the last too many years of my life untying myself from the knots that result from an unhealthy focus on that issue. DeYoung's book is a lucid guide that shows me how it was that I untied the knots I've succeeded in untying, and shows me how to untie the knots that remain.

This anti-self-help book is also a perfect generational compendium to Stuff White People Like. "Some of this is a generational thing," writes DeYoung.

"After all, my peers and I were among the first ones to experience grade inflation, where we got A's for excavating our feelings and 'doing our best' at calculus. We were among the first to be programmed for self-esteem, as we learned that having a pulse made us wonderfully special.... It's no wonder we expect people to affirm us for everything, criticize us for nothing, and pay us for anything we want to do. We figure we should be able to find a great job right out of college in a great location that provides the same standard of living our parents have right now, and involves us in the world's troubles in a way that would make Bono proud. We want it all - all we need is for God to who show us the way...

I wonder if the abundance of opportunities to explore today is doing less to help make well-rounded disciples of Christ and more to help Christians avoid long-term responsibility and have less long-term impact.... Our eagerness to know God's will is probably less indicative of a heart desperately wanting to obey God and more about our heads spinning with all the choices to be made."

Just Do Something is a consistently well-written, desperately needed tonic for evangelical ills. Or, to put that in the Christianese that DeYoung so effectively criticizes: God told me that he wants you to read this book, and if you don't you'll miss his perfect plan and be miserable forever.

Consummate, don't flirt

Not terribly surprising to see this kind of stuff coming from the contemporary art world. As I have plans to be in Manchester this summer during the "hermit's" tower enclosure, Ansuman Biswas should know that I will be the one shouting (charitably) from the street: "Why don't you just get it over with and convert to Christianity!"

In the words of Alain Besançon, artists today have "turned the amnesia regarding Christian disciplines and dogma to their advantage."

Will the Real Academic Growth Industry Please Stand Up?

In his not-to-be-overlooked recent web essay, Rusty Reno reports that critical theory “remains an academic growth industry.” Berkeley’s Martin Jay, a scholar who has spent his career steeped in critical theory, see things differently.

In his review of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (History and Theory, Feb. 2009), Jay describes an endless flow of freshly published religion books, such as Religion: Beyond a Concept, a tome which exceeds 1000 pages and is only the first of five projected volumes in a series entitled “The Future of the Religious Past.” After listing similar projects, Jay confesses exasperation with academia’s religious growth industry:

Clearly, whether or not religion can be said to have “returned”–did it ever really go away?–in an age that is no longer fully secular, it has generated a tsunami of scholarly commentary in many different fields sweeping over the nascent twenty-first century in the way that reinvigorated religious practice promises to do as well. The cultured despisers of yore–a few well-publicized exceptions like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins aside–have been replaced by a new gaggle of no-less cultured admirers. In the most advanced theoretical circles, it is now possible to speak, in the words of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, of “the breakdown of the philosophical prohibition of religion.” Making one’s way through this thicket of new interpretation and appreciation is not, however, easy, especially for those of us who remain religiously “unmusical,” to borrow Max Weber’s still felicitous phrase.

Reno and Jay are, I think, both right. The questions is whether the burgeoning academic interest in religion will tame religion with critical theory, or let religion do some of the taming.

like a shot

The First Things site has that pleasant new car smell. I've got a post on academia over at First Thoughts, further confirmation of the point coming from Stanley Fish in the January 2005 Chronicle of Higher Ed:

When Jacques Derrida died, I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion... Announce a course with "religion" in the title, and you will have an overflow population. Announce a lecture or panel on "religion in our time" and you will have to higher a larger hall.

That said, I plan to still be interested in religion when academia gives up on it again as well.

Green bubble goes "pop" according to a deeply informed and well written article at National Review... wait, sorry - make that The New Republic. Listen to it at Out Loud Opinion.

I've also got a contemporary art write-up at First Things today.

Balkanized Aesthetics

After surveying art world quirks, Bruce Herman makes an irenic point:

I think a lot of ink could be saved, and a lot of breath too, by simply accepting that the art culture around us is engaged in pursuing what is enjoyable to those who want to participate - and leave it at that.

Etienne Gilson makes the same observation, but from another angle:

Thanks to the fine arts, matter enters by anticipation into something like the state of glory promised to it by theologians at the end of time, when it will be thoroughly spiritualized. A universe having no other function than to be beautiful would be a glorious thing indeed. Those for whom that notion means nothing should not carp at others for dreaming about it and enjoying, in the beauty of works of art, a glimpse of it (33-34).

Both Herman and Gilson suggest that different art worlds, with their accompanying aesthetic languages, should live and let live.

(Those shocked to learn that N.T. Wright was not the first to exploit the new creation trope, deep breaths... deep breaths...)

I like the sound of Kevin DeYoung's anti-tinkering manifesto. Yes, I know I'm still in grad school, but to my (or more accurately, my wife's) credit - ten year anniversary is tomorrow.

update: I stand corrected. No decade of marriage until Friday.

annual blog on blog post

Yes, there are too many blogs. In a way, however, there are not enough. I've long planned (but never followed through) on exerting the mental energy to come up with the perfect counter-example to Edward Gibbon's silly diphthong dismissal of Christology (chp. 21), and now I don't have to, because David at Plumb Lines did. Then there are Bruce Herman's in depth reflections on contemporary art over at Question Autonomy. Posts of such quality are rare. Too many blogs, but not enough.

I try to avoid blogging on blogging, but mythbusting never hurts, and Alan Jacobs has helpfully indicated the Achilles' heel of the medium: chronological, not qualitative, organization. I've attempted to manage this with a homespun lefthand sidebar enabling new readers to break the tyranny of the moment and to choose from past. Other blogs, please follow.

If anyone ever has a tip on how to make this blog better, please email. Next millinerd blog on blogging: 2010.

New Books

Princeton's Ivy-chic Labyrinth bookstore is an impressively well-stocked delight, and can always be counted on to evoke an Ecclesiastes 12:12 moment, vindicating Hugh of St. Victor who said - in the twelfth century - "The number of books is infinite. Don't chase after the infinite."

This week on my monthly scan I learned of Le Corbusier's involvement with the occult, and speculated about Michael Camille's occult involvement as he seems capable of publishing from the grave. Most surprising, however, was seeing the face of Pavel Florenksy amidst one of the new book displays. Whether or not Florensky and company advanced the discipline of mathematics, I can assure you that Florensky advanced the discipline of art history.

I was also pleased to see that Colum Hourihane (of ICA fame) has just released his new book on fluctuating Pilate imagery. However Pontian interpretations may have shifted, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that all such variegations be grounded in the words of the earliest gospel, who records that Pilate's primal sin (at the very least) was attempting to please the crowd. Caveat blogger.

This is what keeps me off the streets, the next installment of which my friend Kostis and I will be presenting in Vancouver.

Beautiful... for now

Notice how the fluorescence of Frank Gehry's new Lewis Library in Princeton pops in tandem with the buds of Spring. Dazzling contemporaneity. Enjoy it now, because when graduating Princetonians come back for their five year reunion, chances are the colors on the Lewis "Library" (there's little room for books) won't be so bright; and it may take a little more than Windex to keep this glass clean. (The Louvre, after much frustration, resorted to robots.) Gehry's new building is a visually provocative, downright sculptural creation - snazzy study space with expensive chairs and ample refreshments. But for longevity (and dryness), my money's on Dimitri Porphrios' Whitman College.

After Theory: Religion

In his not-to-be-overlooked recent web essay, Rusty Reno reports that critical theory "remains an academic growth industry." Berkeley's Martin Jay, a scholar who has spent his career steeped in critical theory, see things differently.

In his review of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (History and Theory, Feb. 2009), Jay describes an endless flow of freshly published religion books, such as Religion: Beyond a Concept, a tome which exceeds 1000 pages and is only the first of five projected volumes in a series entitled "The Future of the Religious Past." After listing similar projects, Jay confesses exasperation with academia's religious growth industry:

Clearly, whether or not religion can be said to have "returned" - did it ever really go away? - in an age that is no longer fully secular, it has generated a tsunami of scholarly commentary in many different fields sweeping over the nascent twenty-first century in the way that reinvigorated religious practice promises to do as well. The cultured despisers of yore - a few well-publicized exceptions like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins aside - have been replaced by a new gaggle of no-less cultured admirers. In the most advanced theoretical circles, it is now possible to speak, in the words of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, of "the breakdown of the philosophical prohibition of religion." Making one’s way through this thicket of new interpretation and appreciation is not, however, easy, especially for those of us who remain religiously "unmusical," to borrow Max Weber’s still felicitous phrase.

Reno and Jay are, I think, both right. The questions is whether the burgeoning academic interest in religion will tame religion with critical theory, or let religion do some of the taming.

the idol of absence

It's funny how I feel instinctually nervous for having just endorsed a critique of critical theory. I'm in the humanities. I can't shirk the feeling that they're going to come get me for stepping out of line. Should this blog go silent, tell my wife I love her, inquire if Joel Osteen does funerals, and don't let them repo the CRV.

But at least I know I'm not alone in my trepidation. In a 2004 Art Bulletin review of Hans Belting's Bild-Anthropologie, Yale's Chris Wood airs a devastating critique of theory, but only after taking proper precautions by doubly removing himself from the statement, providing a hypothetical summary of someone else's ideas.

"Belting's argument, were he to spell it out, might run something like this: critical theory is certainly all about mediation. But it has become a mere rhetoric of mediation, a set of analytic routines designed to disrupt any possible exchange of meaning. Critical theory, he might say, has become a negative theology that has made an idol of absence itself; it is a self-contained tautological scholasticism increasingly closed to the perspectives of the physical sciences, to any true interdisciplinarity, to the realities of politics, to experience itself."

Well said, Professor Wood - I mean hypothetical Hans Belting as summarized by Wood. Very well said.

critical theory on the ground

R.R. Reno (Teaching in the Twenty-First Century) explains why the Scholastic method as exemplified by Thomas is the quintessence, not the bane, of critical thought. Along the way, he puts his finger on the very different nature of critical theory,

an intellectual project, the main goal of which is to show that conventional ways of thinking are hopelessly naïve, if not malign and corrupt. It is a deck-clearing operation - not to prepare students for truth, but to prepare them for life without truths.

Let me provide an on the ground example of how the expose-the-power-structures project translates into the life of a bright Princeton undergraduate. I'm at the Bookeye today (the Gandolph the white of your tired gray xerox machine), and a previous student of mine casually asks an acquaintance,

"You're majoring in comp lit!? Why not politics?"

"Comp lit is interesting," she replies.

"Yeah, but politics is everything. I majored in art history, but switched to politics, because that's what art history was really about. For my art history papers I just talked about how art was a way for the gringos to keep those Native Americans down."

Hoping for backup, he looks to me and says, "That's art history, right Matt?"

I smiled and responded, "Some would say."

This time, it's personal

The City wonders if I missed the personal, not theological, point of Knippenberg's review. I wish I had. Problem is, I did catch it, and therein spotted myself. Personal reasons, such as the heritage card, are what you rely on when you were chasing the theological straight and nothing turned. The Reformation was not about heritage.

Let me explain why I feel deprived of theological reasons for not being Catholic: First, I find myself wondering what positive Protestant beliefs there are that one is forbidden to believe in the Catholic Church. My answer: None. This leads me to cling to objections. Theological emphases or preferences won't cut it. What is required to sustain the serious matter of church division are the most serious of objections, ones by which the church stands or falls. This is why the early Barth may have been onto something when he said that the analogia entis was the invention of the anti-Christ, and hence the only good reason to not become Catholic. Yes, Barth was wrong about that; but when Barthians soften his rhetoric today with an insulating layer of ecumenical fuzzies, they know not what they do. The Reformation started with such hard-hitting language, and only so can it continue. However untrue and perverse, there is something profoundly shrewd about the time-honored American tradition of referring to Catholicism as the whore of Babylon. Such rhetoric ensured Protestantism's survival; abandoning it all but guarantees Protestant ill health.

If Trueman is right about the Catholic Church being the default option in the West, then Protestant objections to Catholicism, whatever they may be, must be able to bear the weight of continued church division. That's a lot of pressure per cubic foot of objection. When the stakes are this high, it seems rather chintzy to to nit-pick the Catholic Catechism's soteriology insisting, "That's not exactly how I see it," or to parse clauses of the Joint Declaration on Justification insisting "more progress must be made." Progress towards what? I thought the point was unity - and after a century of ecumenical effort, few should be fooled as to where real prospects for unity reside.

This is what Carl Braaten meant when, writing in Concordia Theological Quarterly, he analogized Lutherans to Frenchmen exiled from Nazi-occupied France:

Now, what if the Free French forgot the reason for their exile, and as expatriates became so accustomed to life outside of France that they forgot about returning and reuniting with the French countrymen they had left behind? What if they began to think and act as though what was meant to be only a temporary arrangement in an emergency situation had actually become for them a permanent home and established settlement? ... If that would have happened, one would call it a tragedy, akin to the tragedy of the Reformation.

When Protestantism is understood as exile, theological grips by which to resist the gravitational force of Catholicism are hard to find.

This, however, leaves us with the personal, the situational reasons to not be Catholic, which can provide that missing grip. In fact, ideas are overrated. Personal reasons may ultimately be the face cards of the matter at hand. There's the professional model, exemplified by Tony Blair who didn't become Catholic until he stepped down from a rather high profile position. Or the spousal model, exemplified by Thomas Howard who didn't become Catholic until his wife gave him her ungrudging blessing. Perhaps some people are too quick to override such personal reasons, trampling over a faithful spouse or a family heritage as they dash madly for the Tiber. We don't make our theological decisions in sanitized intellectual laboratories vacuum sealed from personal and professional reality. And no, that's not relativism - it's theologically informed realism. Yes, such personal reasons can amount to a refusal to "take up your cross and follow Me," but to assume they always amount to that is thick-headed. There are good, and bad, personal reasons for not being Catholic. But the things about personal reasons is, they're personal.

What part of "tolle lege" don't you understand?

There have been some very rich and important insights on Dan Siedell's blog, the intellectual background for which is provided by his God in the Gallery. Continuing cul-de-sacs in the Christianity and art conversation (let alone the art world at large) lead me, unfortunately, to assume that not enough people have read God in the Gallery, nor have they been checking Siedell's blog, which has now earned the hallowed spot "above the fold" on the millinerd sidebar. If only that placement actually meant something, we'd be getting somewhere. I've got about 100 feed subscribers and 50 facebook followers, and I'm grateful for each of them (by all means, please sign on if you haven't). But as far as blog size goes, that's limited promotional capital, capital which I just spent.

The sad reality is that unless one can somehow martial the media machine, we are dependent upon one another for promotion. I've jumped up and down to promote Dan's book with high praise (along with some inevitable disagreements expressed there and here). What else can I do? Things just hum along as if this book was not written. This is frustrating. Buy his book, will you? Buy it especially if the art world puzzles or frustrates you. Or at least throw this interview onto the ipod for the next jog. Unless of course, you like cul-de-sacs, which it appears a good many people do.

The Last Crusade

The Cigarette Smoking blog points out the mindless moralism of Watchman. Sure, permit the four minute gratuitous sex scene staged in a bizarre aircraft - just don't let the character smoke. Nevermind the effect that New York City going up in the smoke of nuclear annihilation might have upon viewers, just don't let those viewers see a good character smoke.

A more ridiculous case of this was on offer in Constantine. One would think a movie about a man who repeatedly travels to hell would be low on moral impact. But no, Constantine resounded with a message clear as crystal: Don't smoke. That smoking is bad for you was not a sub-plot to this movie - it was the plot. The opening scene: Constantine smokes. The final scene: Constantine has given up smoking. At one point the surgeon general's warning even filled up the entire screen for a full four seconds. The message: You can even end up in hell, your lungs burning in torture for all eternity, so long as you don't smoke there.

Sad it is to see the orphaned moral impulse of an entire culture desperately cling to something of comparative insignificance. For refreshing contrast, consider the famous story about the beginning of Opus Dei. José Maria Escriva (of canonizable personal holiness) told the first three ordained Opus Dei priests that in order not to stand out in 1944 Spain, one of them was going to have to start smoking. Father Portilla took up the challenge, and ended up succeeding Escriva.