Electrical Metaphysics

I understand that nuanced, sympathetic readings of passé, modernist theologians is far more fashionable than just quoting them at their worst and moving on. Nevertheless, life is short, and while I admire those who can read with such patience, there's still something to be said for the older strategy of snickering, semi-respectful dismissal.

We all know Rudolf Bultmann's most famous quote: "It is impossible to use electric light... and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles" (New Testament and Mythology, 5). Yet I can't think of a more anti-Bultmannian statement than Owl City's Fireflies video, where a younger generation ponders the metaphysics of light, as manifested by an ornamented bedroom's electricity. Texas Instruments never looked so good. Next step: disillusionment, or an encounter with the Light of the world.

P.S. Yes, I'm about a year behind in my Generation Z music coverage. If you come to millinerd for that then diversify your feeds.

The Saga Continues

Just so millinerd knows I still care even while posting elsewhere, here's more from Sarah Jane Boss's Empress and Handmaid:

Whereas the worshipper before the Virgin in Majesty is the servant of the Lord and Lady whose presence the statue conveys, the actors in the pornographic film or photograph are servants of the pornographer and viewer who summon and pay for their presence.

The medium which seems to represent 'individuals' - the photography of fashion and pornography – in fact imposes sterotypes for replication in social reality. Yet the icon, which makes no pretence at physical literalism, allows the viewer the freedom to find the individual beauty of particular human beings.

Like the trucker with a family on both coasts, I'm trying to please two blogs. This can't last. It's unnatural.

P.S. Does this post mean people will find my blog when they search for pornography?

Crowe-Be-Gone

Reading the title of this upcoming conference on Jonathan Edwards washed away the residual Russell Crowe.  Edwards is in fact Princeton's beautiful mind. Why didn't I think of that? Let's all go to that conference on October 23rd just to thank them.  Edwards, of course, was wrong on election (that's what Barth is for), but Edwards was right on participation, and certainly right on beauty.  Did I mention the leaves over his grave are starting to turn?  I'm honestly considering setting up little tomb-side chapel over there... with candles!

P.S. Perhaps my argument is more with Ron Howard than with Crowe on this score - but both of them are offered a free Princeton history tour should they return.

P.D. James on University Religion

In A Taste for Death, the novelist P.D. James placed the following words on the lips of a secular woman trying to make sense of religion. To do so, the character reaches back to her college years:

Annecroft Comprehensive certainly had a religion all right, fashionable and, in a school with twenty different nationalities, expedient. It was anti-racism. You soon learned you could get a way with any amount of insubordination, indolence or stupidity if you were sound on this essential doctrine. It struck her that it was like any other religion: it meant what you wanted it to mean; it was easy to learn, a few platitudes, myths and slogans; it was intolerant, it gave you the excuse for occasional selective aggression, and you could make a moral virtue out of despising the people you disliked. Best of all, it cost nothing... If you had to have a school ethos to give the illusion of togetherness, then for her money anti-racism was as good as any. And whatever she might think about its more absurd manifestations, it wasn't likely to lead you to see visions in a dusty church.

Hat tip for that quote to Denise, the family fiction reader (at least until I finish this dissertation).

Tombstone

In Defense of Museums

An article about damage to Vatican art provides some convenient back up for my argument for museums On the Square today. Chapels, especially the Sistine one, don't take well to hoards of tourists.

Without Moving

There I go again posting elsewhere. At least I'm not crossposting. That would be like having an open mistress.

Yes, Ditchkinsing

Perhaps calling Stephen Hawking that is a little harsh, but alas, confusing God with a mechanism is such an elementary mistake, regrettably placing a fine scientist in the company of science/religion "gladiators" up with which Marilynne Robinson and Jon Stewart shall not put. Terry Eagleton goes on in that book I refer to, suggesting that Hawking's latest reasoning "is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov." And in the introduction to this book Eagleton explains what is missing even more precisely:

Some philosophers regard it as conceivable that the world emerged from nothing, while others respond that this is impossible. Thomists, by contrast, argue that it is inconceivable that the world came from nothing, but that it did.

Reno has also chimed in: "Hawking has a reputation for being very smart, but he seems to be invincibly ignorant when it comes to metaphysics." And of course, there's always Mr. Hart:

The question of existence does not concern how it is that the present arrangement of the world came about, from causes already internal to the world, but how it is that anything (including any cause) can exist at all. This question Darwin and Wallace never addressed, nor were ever so hopelessly confused as to think they had. It is a question that no theoretical or experimental science could ever answer, for it is qualitatively different from the kind of questions that the physical sciences are competent to address.

Even if theoretical physics should one day discover the most basic laws upon which the fabric of space and time is woven, or evolutionary biology the most elementary phylogenic forms of terrestrial life, or palaeontology an utterly seamless geneology of every species, still we shall not have thereby drawn one inch nearer to the mystery of existence. No matter how fundamental or simple the level reached by the scientist - protoplasm, amino acids, molecules, subatomic particles, quantum events, unified physical laws, a primordial singularity, mere logical possibilities - existence is something else altogether. Even the simplest of things, and even the most basic of principles, must first of all be, and nothing within the universe of contingent things (nor even the universe itself, even if it were somehow "eternal") can be intelligibly conceived of as the source or explanation of its own being (103).

Basic errors refuted with the most basic religious understanding. I'm getting Da Vinci Code flashbacks.

Oops

I did it again.

"Lobster Truffle?"

...is what a tray-bearing waiter said to me once at a museum reception, interrupting my complaint to a fellow graduate student about a shift in levels of summer travel funding.  I considered myself thoroughly chastened, and have done my best to forswear graduate grumping ever since.  Lest I renege on this commitment, Tony Woodlief provides a very nice reminder.  "News flash Sparky: We're all working hard...   the only time the urgency gets anywhere close to an average day in a profitable company is when someone’s tenure clock is running out."  Also helpful in this department is Steve Jones' sneaky little essay, It's Tough All Over.