Category Archives: Feeling Disgruntled

You’re not “post-” anything, so shut the hell up!

Posted by on December 17, 2009 33 comments

If there was one term I could actually effect a moratorium on I think it would have to be the phrase “post-”. But, since I can’t effect a moratorium, allow me to propose an axiom instead:

Any conceptual position (theological, philosophical, etc.) that describes itself using the modifier “post-” is never actually “post-” anything in anything other than a temporal sense (and usually that’s not the case either).

Postmetaphysical? No. Postfoundationalist? No, you were never foundationalist to start with. Postliberal? No, you’re still liberal. Postmodern? Shut the fuck up, that’s just stupid. Post-postmodern? Kneecaps, meet baseball bat.

The only possible places where I can think of the term “post-” having any real usefulness are in the realms of architecture and art history. Insofar as it gets used by philosophers and theologians its just an attempt to short circuit an argument by pretending that the views you are attacking were a developmental stage you  went through when you were young and not quite as well read as you obviously are now. To call any view “post-” anything is just a masquerade alloying one to define your adversary as wrong, arcane, and naive from the outset.

In short, adopting the language of “post-” is unforgivably cheap and masks a lack of ability to actually make good arguments against things you want to criticize.

Why Conservatives Shouldn’t Make Manifestos

Posted by on November 20, 2009 76 comments

Today saw the release of the “Manhattan Declaration,” a sort of ecumenical conservative manifesto with 148 signatories from Roman, Eastern, and Evangelical denominations. Its a consolidated statement of the usual stuff super conservative Christians care about — abortion, gay marriage, and well, I guess the freedom to not perform abortions and gay marriages, they call this religious freedom.

On the one hand there’s really nothing that needs to be said about this. After all there is nothing really said here that hasn’t been utterly clear for some time. We all know that abortion and gay marriage, framed under the language of religious freedom are pretty much all the Christian political right cares about.

Naturally in the long tirades about a holistic ethic of life there’s no substantial discussion of poverty, let alone militarism and war. Likewise in the flowing praises of marriage as the bedrock of civilization and Christianity don’t see fit to mention any of the things Jesus or Paul actually had to say about marriage. This is standard sub-biblical conservative fare.

This is also precisely why stuff like this shouldn’t be considered a manifesto  in any realistic sense of the term. The document styles itself as standing in the line of Barmen and even MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. This is bullshit. Its simply a consolidation of widely-held conservative opinion. Hell, they even claim that their views represent the majority of Americans while they style it as a bold sort of minority courage against the powers that be. That’s the best thing about popular conservative Christianity. You can be an oppressed minority while still really representing pretty much all the real people.

Its actually painfully obvious what this is all about. Its simply another instance of the conservative Christian unrest that always gets shrilly trumpeted whenever there’s a democrat in the White House. As such this is actually a perfect example of the sort of anxiety I discussed yesterday. What animates this document is nothing more — and I really mean that, quite literally nothing more – than a gnawing fear about not being in a position of cultural power.

We are offered here a vision of Christianity completely and intentionally sold over to ideology. There is no proclamation of the living God, of the crucified and risen Christ here. All we are offered by this document and the movement it represents is a life ruled by the very powers Christ has freed us from. The desperation for control, domination, and security that this movement needs to be called what it is, a falling back into the elemental spirits of the cosmos, a return to the world system that Christ’s death and resurrection has made nothing. It is nothing less than the rejection of actual faith in the coming kingdom of the living God.

Also

Posted by on November 3, 2009 Comments Off

Tacking onto the last post about some hysterics over the blogosphere: Can we please stop with this sort bizarre sensationalism? Seriously, when was the public square ever not run by “bullies, sophists, and clowns”? The idea that things around us are suddenly descending into barbarism is just silly. Its been utterly barbaric for time immemorial.

I honestly wonder if people who make this sort of jilted noise really read stuff that has been part of “the public square” over the last couple hundred years or so. I have trouble finding anything today that is significantly more stupid, barbaric, or insane than what passed for public discourse throughout the last few centuries. Humanity has always been stupid, barbaric, and insane and the notion that once upon a time before blogs and interwebs there was a time of glorious civic virtue and rational public debate is just fantasy. All McDaniel’s post provides is hand-wringing nostalgia for something that never existed.

Democracy’s False Humility

Posted by on October 1, 2009 35 comments

It is often said — going back to Churchill, right? — that democracy is the worst form of government in the world . . . except for all the others. This comment generally occurs in discussions where somebody is being critical of this or that aspect of democracy or democratic practice. Inevitably some genius whips out this aphorism  as a way to somehow validate the person’s point while simultaneously making sure that it has no potential impact on anything. “Yes, your point is clearly valid, but any alternative to the problem you point out is infinitely worse, so how about you shut the hell up now?”

Could we please have people who say this sort of thing just drop this disingenuous trope altogether? The thin rhetorical shroud around this all too common quip is nothing other than false humility. What’s really being said is that democracy is the best system of government the world has ever produced — I mean if “all the others” are worse, where do you think that leaves us?

After all, if democracy really is the best form of government ever, why tip-toe around it with false humility and patronization?

The Sexy Amish?

Posted by on September 12, 2009 17 comments

It never ceases to amaze me what crazy stuff Christians will buy. Apparently the hottest new Christian romance novels tend to be set among the Amish. Sometimes the characters even share passionate kisses.

Something about this pisses me off in a deep way that kind of puzzles me. Do we have to turn the life of the Amish community into a commodity? And even if we do, do we have to rape the whole thing by making it a setting for bullshit romance stories?

Insane Quote of the Day

Posted by on August 11, 2009 12 comments

Feminists are trying to dictate to the rest of us what the masculine pronoun is allowed to mean. For me it means the same thing it meant to Milton, Shakespeare, Jane Austin[sic], Flannery O’Connor[,] and C. S. Lewis. Feminists want us to pretend they all meant to exclude women from practically everything but that is ridiculous. And they demand that we pretend that the traditional use of “man” for humankind MEANS males only. But it doesn’t and pretty much everybody knows it.

So you can demand that the meaning of words be changed. That does not mean the meanings will change. I suggest that you will find only pro-feminists (and people who haven’t thought much about it but are trying to be nice and agreeable) agreeing with you, which proves my point. It is not about communication, but ideology.

Of course the first thing to say about this is that the conflict is not about meaning, but about literary ethics. Sure we all know that folks mean humanity when they say mankind, but the question is why we should prefer to gender our gender-inclusive terms in the first place. What reason would justify talking about men and women in purely masculine terms? That is the question. Obviously.

How sadly hilarious the kind of thinking in this quote really is! What’s insidious about it is the way that it equates anything challenging the status quo with ideology: using masculine language to describe the human race as a whole is the norm; any challenge to that is ideological feminist totalitarianism.

Are we really fools enough to think that masculine-centric linguistic conventions are simply benign? What masquerades as a condemnation of “ideology” actually turns out to be an exercise of pure ideology itself. Certain contingent linguistic norms are enshrined as necessary, natural, and unquestionable. This is anything but the rejection of some new ideology. Rather it is merely the blind act of perpetuating an old one.

On Gender-Accurate Language

Posted by on August 11, 2009 13 comments

There’s a pretty interesting article in the Times about the “controversy” over gender-accurate language (scare quotes are because there isn’t really a controversy, just a handful of very irrational and vocal people that think masculinity is the ultimate definition of the human).

Anyways, it turns out that the use of masculine pronouns as a stand-in for humanity in general is not an ancient phenomenon—at least not in the English language:

Traditionalists, of course, find nothing wrong with using he to refer to an anybody or an everybody, male or female. After all, hasn’t he been used for both sexes since time immemorial? Well, no, as a matter of fact, it hasn’t. It’s a relatively recent usage, as these things go. And it wasn’t cooked up by a male sexist grammarian, either.

If any single person is responsible for this male-centric usage, it’s Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book, according to the sociohistorical linguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Fisher’s popular guide, “A New Grammar” (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes.

The idea that he, him and his should go both ways caught on and was widely adopted. But how, you might ask, did people refer to an anybody before then? This will surprise a few purists, but for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine. Nobody seemed to mind that they, them and their were officially plural. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, writers were comfortable using they with an indefinite pronoun like everybody because it suggested a sexless plural.

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Acedia and Visual Media

Posted by on May 1, 2009 15 comments

So my latest theological–and somewhat personal–fascination has been with the concept of acedia, or as it is catalogued in the list of deadly sins, sloth. There is little question in my mind that acedia is the primary bane of my existence. There are literally dozens if not hundreds of worthwhile pursuits that I feel interested in, but when it comes down to uncontested time, I seem to inevitably end up watching an entire season of this or that awesome show. Btw, all you guys should totally check out Deadwood, its like, totally awesome…

St. Thomas has been quoted as providing perhaps the most arresting definition of acedia as “a sadness arising from the fact that the good is difficult.” If that doesn’t describe the sort of lethargy and listlessness that typifies my hours of transfixed attention to HBO series’ I don’t know what does.

Dante also interestingly claimed that acedia alone of all the seven deadly sins arose from a lack, an insufficiency in our love for God. In Purgatorio all of the souls in Purgatory who were guilty of acedia find themselves forced to constantly run at top speed. That’s perhaps the worst post-mortem punishment our generation could imagine.

The LCD screen is perhaps the worst facilitator of acedia to ever be invented. I’m sure writing a blog about this topic is the right move… Are there support groups for visual media addicts? I think I’m a visual media addict. The real world just requires too much attention and activity.

Are the “New Calvinists” Reformed?

Posted by on March 30, 2009 9 comments

Time Magazine ranks the “New Calvinism” as number three on the list of the top ten ideas changing the world. This is actually a self-applied term by the Mark Driscoll crowd, and basically it names a movement within the emergentish sector of evangelical Christians (i.e. middle class white people in their twenties and early thirties) toward a few theological emphases. Basically it amounts to an enthusiastic propagation of a strongly deterministic account divine providence and predestination, strong advocacy for a hierarchical theology of gender roles both in the church and home, and a zealous missiology.

One of the key adjectives for this group is the label “Reformed.” They take great delight in affirming their distinct status as the new heirs of the Reformed tradition. They love Spurgeon, Edwards, Calvin, and any and all things Puritan.

However, a look at the theological conflicts within the Presbyterian and Reformed churches in America reveal something interesting. Within actual Reformed churches there is massive infighting over what counts as truly being “Reformed.” Within the more conservative denominations there is a strong surge towards reasserting the Reformed confessions of the sixteenth century as the definition of what it means to belong to the Reformed tradition.

In short, in response to various theological developments, particularly related to Pauline scholarship, there is a massive resurgence of a rigid confessionalism as the definition of Reformed identity. And on the one hand, this is fairly reasonable, I think. After all, if you want the adjective to have an meaning as a moniker it has to have some concrete content. However, if the Reformed confessions are taken as a stable criterion of what counts as being “Reformed”, then the irony is that the New Calvinists are not Reformed at all. Key Reformed distinctives, like infant baptism, Christ’s Eucharistic presence, the threefold pattern of ministry, etc. are not embraced by the New Calvinists.

So, what we really have in this new movment is not actually a rebirth of “Reformed theology” in any historically meaningful sense. What we have is a typically evangelical gerrymandering of historical sources designed to support a few key theological commitments, namely to a strong theology of determinism and gender roles. So, the interesting question to be asking, then, is not “Why is Reformed theology making a comeback?” becuase it, in fact is not. Rather the interesting question is why is there such a substantial evangelical undertow attracting people to a strongly deterministic doctrine of God and rigidly defined gender roles?

More on Petty Christian Virtues

Posted by on March 19, 2009 7 comments

In an an evangelical subculture that gets its ire up more over cussing than torture, Hoekendjik has some wisdom:

Christian virtues that are present [in the church] are minimized, while while the kind of “church virtues” that Dorothy Sayers once described as a combination of stateliness, childishness, shyness, dullness, sentimentality, daintiness, and depressedness are enlarged into colossal proportions. What would anyone have to do with that?

Theology of the Cross and Profanity

Posted by on March 19, 2009 18 comments

Dave Horstkoetter has plunked up a disturbing YouTube video of a neocon hack opining that Christianity and torture are just all hunky dory with one another. No surprise there of course. What is surprising is the fact that the whole discussion over there has turned into a goofy little kerfuffle about whether or not it’s really “Christian” to denounce endorsing torture while…uttering the F-word. 

Leave it to us Christians to make conversations like this.

However, in the interest of settling this debate once and for all, I have a syllogism for us. Given that nearly all Protestants and certainly all evangelicals affirm Luther’s theological genius, especially his famed “theology of the cross”, let’s start there. Thesis 21 of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation states that “A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.” I’m sure we can all agree on this point. Thus…

P1: Theologians of the cross ought to name things, events, and persons in accordance with what they actually are.

P2: Some things, events, and persons can only be truthfully described as fuckdragons and assclowns.

C: Ergo, the use of profanity is not only permissible, but essential for anyone who claims to be a theologian of the cross.

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