Category Archives: Being wierd

The politics of celebrity commentating

Posted by on March 3, 2011 6 comments

It’s always struck me as quite odd how the throat-clearing that goes on at the front of so many quasi-intellectual essays talking about recent celebrity drama/gossip/insane meltdowns inevitably takes the form of the author establishing with absolute clarity their own complete and utter disinterest in celebrities. Apparently the only way you can establish yourself as a compelling voice about this particular facet of pop culture is to claim that you yourself, unlike that huddled masses crowding around the tabloid displays in the checkout lines, are above even giving a shit about our nation’s economic and entertainment elite.

Why is this? I can only surmise that its a kind of ressentiment or at best a sort of tactical self-deception that the author knows they’re going to need to engage in in order to stomach talking about people much richer and famous than they. In order for me to sound both current and interesting, I have to feign complete disinterest in the matter I’m about to spend a whole bunch of time having a metadiscussion about. If I were to admit being interested in the banal topic I’m writing about, all fictive authority and supercool pop cultural street cred would melt away and I’d be just another talking head passing on celebrity gossip on EW.

Allow me to venture an unprovable, but I think quite probably true hypothesis about what’s actually going in most celebrity commentators. If anyone really and truly doesn’t care that much about Brad and Angelina’s most recent adoptions and affairs, I’ll wager its the talking head who is forced to sit across from them and act interested as they interview them. By contrast it is online magazine writer, whose book likely sits somewhere around #1,079,836 on Amazon, who actually does care, feverishly, about what’s going on in celebrity culture and how they can write about it in a way that establishes themselves as decidedly above the fray of the cultural trend of celebrity fascination. Indeed, I’d contend that there’s a good case to be made that it is denial of interest in celebrity culture that is the most developed and potent instance of celebrity fascination itself. People that really don’t care about celebrities don’t care enough to prattle on about it.

Unequally yoked

Posted by on January 6, 2011 10 comments

So this may just be a throwback to some of my conservative evangelical roots, but I’m sure many of us are familiar with the common pastoral injunction that Christians, biblically speaking, ought not to ever even consider marrying one who was not a Christian. After all, this is what Paul referred to in 2 Cor 6:14 when he commanded us not to “be unequally yoked [Gk: heterozugeo] with unbelievers.”

Now, I think a contextual reading of the passage makes abundantly clear that what Paul is arguing against is not related to marriage and sexuality at all, but rather in trying to convince the Corinthians to adhere to his teachings rather than those of potential (unbelieving) competitors. But whatever, leaving the exegetical reality of that behind, lets take a look at what it might mean for marriage if we took the common appropriation of this text seriously.

The most striking part of it is the “unequal” business. If the text is taken (correctly) to be referring to non-Christian teachers in conflict with Paul’s message it makes sense. Their message is one that is mismatched, unfitting, inferior to the good news that Paul is trying to bring the Corinthians. But if this is somehow about marriage, doesn’t that imply a fundamental inequality between partners as being inscribed into marriage itself? It seems to me that there is a hidden enthusiasm among proponents of “don’t marry non-Christians” interpreters of this verse about the potential door this opens to construing marriage as a hierarchical relation of power. But maybe I’m just being paranoid.

Supersized eucharist?

Posted by on March 23, 2010 5 comments

According to one study, it looks like over the last thousand years or so our artistic representations of the Last Supper have seen the food portions get bigger and bigger:

Has even the Last Supper been supersized?

The food in famous paintings of the meal has grown by biblical proportions over the last millennium, researchers report in a medical journal Tuesday.

Using a computer, they compared the size of the food to the size of the heads in 52 paintings of Jesus Christ and his disciples at their final meal before his death.

If art imitates life, we’re in trouble, the researchers conclude. The size of the main dish grew 69 percent; the size of the plate, 66 percent, and the bread, 23 percent, between the years 1000 and 2000.

Probably doesn’t mean all that much. Still a bit odd and amusing though.

Biblical studies pet peve

Posted by on March 10, 2010 13 comments

Okay, I know that chaisms are a major literary feature in Hebrew poetry and elsewhere throughout the Scriptures, and that’s all fine and good. However I really can’t stand the tendency to try to find them absolutely everywhere in Scripture. For example Wes Howard-Brook’s Becoming Children of God: Radical Discipleship in the Gospel of John divides up every single section of Scripture in the entire book into chiasms. Every single one. All of them.

Come on.

I’m all for literary analysis, but the ubiquity of chiasms seems way too forced to me, at least in many, many cases.

So what’s your biblical studies grumpkin?

Where’s the hole?

Posted by on February 14, 2010 34 comments

It seems to me that most of us — and by “us” I mean those of us who tend to read and write theology blogs — have at least one big hole in our education that we tend to regret and be somewhat annoyed about. For my part its definitely the paucity of my languages. I have a good working knowledge of Hebrew, despite being out of practice and some Greek, but as far as academic languages go that’s it. No German, no Latin, no French. And it bums me out.

Well, that’s the hole I think I have in my academic theological cred. What’s yours?

Waxing Hauerwasian

Posted by on January 29, 2010 26 comments

In light of the recent mega-conversation on Hauerwas and the truth of the gospel, perhaps folks will indulge me if I wax Hauerwasian for a moment:

“If you need a church to worship Jesus, then worship your fucking church!”

Of course, you may know that the actual quote that Hauerwas has stated many times is “If you need a theory to worship Jesus, then worship your fucking theory!”

Just saying.

JPII and Self-Flagellation

Posted by on January 27, 2010 12 comments

Interesting stuff about the late pope’s ascetical practices from a forthcoming book by the Monsignor who’s promoting his candidacy for sainthood:

Pope John Paul II whipped himself with a belt, even on vacation, and slept on the floor as acts of penitence and to bring him closer to Christian perfection, according to a new book by the Polish prelate spearheading his sainthood case. . . .

At a news conference Tuesday, [Monsignor] Oder defended John Paul’s practice of self-mortification, which some faithful use to remind them of the suffering of Jesus on the cross.

“It’s an instrument of Christian perfection,” Oder said, responding to questions about how such a practice could be condoned considering Catholic teaching holds that the human body is a gift from God.

In the book, Oder wrote that John Paul frequently denied himself food — especially during the holy season of Lent — and “frequently spent the night on the bare floor,” messing up his bed in the morning so he wouldn’t draw attention to his act of penitence.

“But it wasn’t limited to this. As some members of his close entourage in Poland and in the Vatican were able to hear with their own ears, John Paul flagellated himself. In his armoire, amid all the vestments and hanging on a hanger, was a belt which he used as a whip and which he always brought to Castel Gandolfo,” the papal retreat where John Paul vacationed each summer.

For a fellow so deeply known for his book Theology of the Body, I can’t help but find this at least a bit odd/interesting. I certainly think there is plenty of good and fitting modes of ascetical practice (like fasting, vigils, etc.), but I find something deeply incongruous between the act of self-flagellation and the affirmation of the body’s goodness and dignity.

When does bodily discipline simply degenerate into bodily denigration?

H/T: Sully

In defense of ass-kicking

Posted by on January 13, 2010 36 comments

In recent discussion about some comments by Gene McCarraher in the in-progress TOJ interview, some interesting stuff came about the relative merits of kicking ass, argumentatively speaking. The passage that occasioned this discussion in the interview is as follows:

I was giving a talk in Chicago a few months after the invasion, and a student asked me a question that just knocked me for a loop. “If the government is protecting me from harm,” he asked, “isn’t it OK for them to lie to me? I mean, if I’m safe, and if it’s for my own good that they’re lying to me, what’s the harm?” I couldn’t believe that a post-sixties college student would even think of asking such a stupid question. I asked him, “So, when do you want the government to not lie to you? If it’s for your own good that they lie to you, why should peacetime make any difference? Why should they tell you the truth at all? For that matter, why should they tell you anything? Why should you want or care to know, ‘as long as you’re safe’?” His very question indicated to me that, for a large cohort of this college generation, truth, falsehood, and evidence just don’t mean very much. “Whatever.”

The discussion brought up the question of whether it was more profitable to kick ass or to foster a “prophetic capacity to see that patience is a far more revolutionary way to engage this generation, to stoke its creative impulses, and stir it from sleep.” From that point the discussion went on to what I take to be a rather good accord, so what follows should not be construed as a critique of the commenter, but rather as something of a spin-off about the merits of ass-kicking as such.

For my money a good verbal ass-kicking is not opposed to a proper revolutionary patience. In fact, to turn a Yoderian phrase here (via Rom Coles), I think ass-kicking is perhaps a vital form of “wild patience.” After all, ass-kicking is not assault or murder, its a form of rebuke, of chastening, of discipline. Certainly ass-kicking can reach a point where it is excessive and sadistic, and finding that line is always the challenge (witness my own, perhaps overblown tendency to verbally kick Mark Driscoll’s ass).

The point though—and I mean this in a very experiential way, having been the recipient of many utterly needed ass-kickings—is that without ass-kicking there’s not much chance of real knowledge, let alone intellectual or personal transformation. Without regular ass-kickings we’re left with precious little besides benign strokings. That helps no one. Ever. While ass-kickings may sometimes kick up plenty of unhelpful dust, they also have far more of a creative capacity to uncover things that are hidden, to bring to light that which needs to be exposed.

That is why ass-kickings can be painful. But it is also why they are much more fruitful and redemptive than any amount of stroking and self-confirmation.

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