It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”
That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.
And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast — Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist — jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.
The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year, campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention to the use and abuse of new technology.
Those who knew Mr. Clementi — on the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, N.J., at his North Jersey high school and in a community orchestra — were anguished by the circumstances surrounding his death, describing him as an intensely devoted musician who was sweet and shy.
“It’s really awful, especially in New York and in the 21st century,” said Arkady Leytush, artistic director of the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra, where Mr. Clementi played since his freshman year in high school. “It’s so painful. He was very friendly and had very good potential.”
The Middlesex County prosecutor’s office said Mr. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of Princeton Junction, N.J., had each been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Mr. Clementi. The most serious charges carry a maximum sentence of five years.
Mr. Ravi was charged with two additional counts of invasion of privacy for trying a similar live feed on the Internet on Sept. 21, the day before the suicide. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, James O’Neill, said the investigation was continuing, but he declined to “speculate on additional charges.”
Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said Wednesday that he considered the death a hate crime. “We are sickened that anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the surreptitious video, might consider destroying others’ lives as a sport,” he said in a statement.
At the end of the inaugural event for the university’s “Project Civility” campaign on Wednesday, nearly 100 demonstrators gathered outside the student center, where the president spoke. They chanted, “Civility without safety — over our queer bodies!”
It is unclear what Mr. Clementi’s sexual orientation was; classmates say he mostly kept to himself. Danielle Birnbohm, a freshman who lived across the hall from him in Davidson Hall, said that when a counselor asked how many students had known Mr. Clementi, only 3 students out of 50 raised their hands.
But Mr. Clementi displayed a favorite quotation on his Facebook page, from the song “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”: “What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia.”
And his roommate’s Twitter message makes plain that Mr. Ravi believed that Mr. Clementi was gay.
A later message from Mr. Ravi appeared to make reference to the second attempt to broadcast Mr. Clementi. “Anyone with iChat,” he wrote on Sept. 21, “I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.”
Ms. Birnbohm said Mr. Ravi had said the initial broadcast was an accident — that he viewed the encounter after dialing his own computer from another room in the dorm. It was not immediately known how or when Mr. Clementi learned what his roommate had done. But Ms. Birnbohm said the episode quickly became the subject of gossip in the dormitory.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
"Private Moment Made Public, Then a Fatal Jump"
In the Times today. I heard about this last week when the details weren't known - and immediately suspected it had something to do with homosexuality. I always suspect that in a story like this - and I'm sad to say I'm usually right, and have been for many years.
A Vestment malfunction, all around
I don't really think that "Stole-Gate" is as big a "situation" as everybody thinks it is, somehow.
But in fact, according to this article, Newman was made a Cardinal by Leo XIII.
Those of us who've been watching Papa Ratzi warily for several years now are very aware of the extent of his tone-deafness - but I think the idea that he grabbed the Leo stole to "rub Anglican noses in it" is going a bit far, even for him.
The real question is: why in the world was he wearing a stole for Evensong?
Thanks to regular reader David for pointing to this story.
Well-known conservative Roman Catholic internet presence Fr John Zuhlsdorf (Fr Z) was watching the Televised broadcast of the Pope in Westminster Abbey when he just about sprayed his coffee on the screen when the commentator mentioned the stole the Pope was wearing.
The Pope’s stole was specially made for Pope Pope Leo XIII.
Pope Leo XIII is well known amongst Anglicans and Roman Catholics for Apostolicae Curae – the document that declared Anglican orders null and void.
Like others (here, here, and here), I don’t think the Pope went to his wardrobe and just reached for the first stole to hand or even the one that looked most attractive that day.
Let’s also not forget that the Pope considers himself the successor of St Peter – to whom Westminster Abbey is dedicated. And, of course, Newman was re-ordained (or for RCs ordained for the first time), and allowed himself to be (re)ordained, before Apostolicae Curae was published.
But in fact, according to this article, Newman was made a Cardinal by Leo XIII.
Those of us who've been watching Papa Ratzi warily for several years now are very aware of the extent of his tone-deafness - but I think the idea that he grabbed the Leo stole to "rub Anglican noses in it" is going a bit far, even for him.
The real question is: why in the world was he wearing a stole for Evensong?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Blessed St. Michael and All Angels!
That's "St. Michael liberating souls from purgatory," by Jacopo Vignali, from the 17th Century. And below is "The Archangel and Tobias," by an unknown painter, also from the 17th Century. It's presumably St. Raphael, since it's found at St. Raphael's Church in Milan.
Here's last year's post, which includes the music for this feast day.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
More Compline online
The recordings page is here.
And here's an article about the choir.
The Opera, and why I love it (I can't help it!)
In the Times today:
ON Monday night, “Das Rheingold,” the first part of a mammoth new production of Richard Wagner’s opera cycle “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” will thunder down on the Metropolitan Opera. A 45-ton set will test the theater’s foundations; a reported $16 million budget will test the company’s finances. In the midst of economic troubles, is it seemly to spend such a vast amount on a spectacle that will be seen by a relatively small, elite audience?
Such questions inevitably arise whenever an opera company forges the “Ring” anew. Last season, the Los Angeles Opera completed its presentation of the cycle, spending $31 million. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors became embroiled in arguments over Wagner’s anti-Semitism, and the singer David Byrne asked on his blog whether the money might have been better spent on arts education. “There is a greater value for humanity,” Mr. Byrne wrote, “in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon.”
As someone who makes a living writing about what Mr. Byrne calls “those dead guys,” I don’t accept his critique. But it’s a thoughtful statement, demanding a more thoughtful answer than the bromides that classical-music advocates have dispensed in the past. It’s not enough to murmur that opera is “high culture” or “serious music.” For one thing, opera has a right to be silly, and often is.
As it happens, a more effective riposte comes from Wagner himself. Amid his absurd and repulsive pronouncements on all manner of topics, you can find some acute insights into music’s place in society. He did not write for the high and mighty; his music is as much a critique of power as an exercise in it. And at a time when so much cultural expression seems secondhand and retrospective, young artists have much to learn from Wagner’s mad ambition.
A few words, first, on the question of money. Opera is expensive, yes, but in the latter-day annals of extravagance it wins no prize. A budget of $16 million, or even $31 million, is hardly extreme for a four-part production that will unfold over two years. (Julie Taymor and her producers are said to be spending $60 million on a “Spider-Man” musical, which will presumably last only one evening.)
Furthermore, the money comes almost entirely from ticket sales and donations; in the financial year just ended, the Met received just $698,000 from various government sources. And the “elite” image is exaggerated. The average seat at the Met costs $138, which is almost exactly what people pay to see the Rolling Stones.
Yet no matter how much the Met talks up its $20 rush tickets or its movie-theater simulcast series, which reaches millions of people a year, it can’t seem to shake its pince-nez image. Perhaps we’ve seen too many commercials with toffs in penguin suits to accept the fact that operagoers are, in fact, a motley middle-class lot. And the Wagner audience is the motliest of all — emeritus professors sit side by side with “Ring”-loving schoolteachers, fanatic record collectors, neophyte opera mavens and that woman wearing a Valkyrie helmet.
That is how Wagner wanted it. While he had a gift for extracting money from the wealthy, and became notoriously conservative in old age, he rejected the conventional picture of the opera house as a playground for socialites. After he fled Germany for Zurich in the wake of his participation in the 1849 Dresden uprising against the crown, he began to argue that the “artwork of the future” would no longer serve the moneyed classes but instead speak to the masses. He denounced the practice of favoring classics over new work. In a letter to the composer Franz Liszt, he heralded a time when “we shall abandon our habit of clinging firmly to the past, our egotistical concern for permanence and immortality at any price.”
In his essay “Art and Revolution,” he proposed that theaters should be underwritten by the state and that all tickets should be free. In 1876, when he inaugurated a festival and opera house dedicated to staging his works in Bayreuth, Germany, he took pride in the democratic seating plan, which, unlike Madison Square Garden, gives everyone a good view.
The “Ring” itself carries a similar message. The adjective “Wagnerian” has entered popular discourse as a synonym for “grandiose,” but this colossal work is, in fact, a devastating deconstruction of the grand illusions of gods, men and dwarves. George Bernard Shaw, in his 1898 treatise “The Perfect Wagnerite,” influentially argued that the “Ring” is “a drama of today,” the power-seeking characters Wotan and Alberich suggesting the ruinous greed and corruption of a plutocratic society. Likewise, the musical language, with its system of identifying characters and concepts by leitmotifs, rejects operatic artifice in favor of direct communication. “There is not a single bar of ‘classical music’ in the ‘Ring,’” Shaw wrote.
The most potent moments are the most intimate, as when Wotan, chief of the gods, faces his own fallibility and, to quote Wagner’s stage directions, sinks into “the feeling of his powerlessness.” The true test of the Met’s production, directed by Robert Lepage, will come not in the Valhalla spectacle of “Das Rheingold,” but next spring, in that scene from “Die Walküre.”
In 1891, Mark Twain, no fan of elite culture, visited Bayreuth. He sent home an essay that reads at first like a methodical takedown: he notes all the weirdness of the Wagner cult, the confounding aspects of the experience. “Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad,” he writes. Then, just when he seems ready to give the knife a final twist, he reveals himself as another convert. “But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.”
In the audience at the “Ring” on Monday night will be more than a few people undergoing the same stunned epiphany. On them, the money will be well spent.
Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, is the author of “Listen to This.”
Monday, September 27, 2010
New Evidence Suggests God Also Had Incredibly Busty Daughter
More typical juvenile humor from The Onion, which for some reason just completely cracked me up. Maybe it's the "Tammi of Nazareth" thing....?
ARABAH VALLEY, ISRAEL—In a discovery that biblical scholars say could alter our most fundamental understanding of Christianity, recently unearthed manuscripts suggest that in addition to His Son, Jesus Christ, God also had a daughter with absolutely humongous breasts.
Scholars say Tammi of Nazareth may have been a major religious figure nearly two millennia before the bra was invented.
The documents, found in a cave near the Jordanian- Israeli border and estimated to have been composed circa A.D. 200, recount the life, teachings, and death of Jesus' well-endowed twin sister, Tammi of Nazareth. According to experts, the revelation points to a more dualistic conception of the divine, one with the male principle embodied in Jesus and the female principle represented by Tammi and her giant, heaving bazoingas.
"It's a monumental shift," said Boston College religion professor Paul Ferber, claiming that the newly discovered texts are more significant than the Gospel of Judas or the Dead Sea Scrolls. "Tammi has single-handedly undercut the male hegemony we've come to associate with the Christian faith, and added an important new dimension to the holy scripture."
"Also, the various sources are in clear agreement that Tammi had the most enormous jugs in all of Galilee," added Ferber, gesturing with his hands."Seriously. Like, out to here."
The existence of Tammi has caused scholars to reexamine the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and replace it with a Quadrinity that includes the Daughter figure—though some, including Ferber, argue it should actually be reconstrued as "a five-way Quintinity, counting as two separate divine powers both of Tammi's bodacious watermelons."
According to the manuscripts, written in Greek on papyrus scrolls, Tammi led a ministry contemporaneously with her brother's. Although she promulgated similar ideas concerning faith, humility, and forgiveness, and appeared to possess the same miraculous powers, Tammi seems to have had more difficulty communicating her message. In one passage, for example, her disciples repeatedly coax her into washing their feet, apparently for a better vantage point from which to observe her "heavenly radiance." And while she, like Jesus, walks on water, the feat is described as almost disappointing to many onlookers, who had apparently hoped to see her run.
Professor Ned McCormick of Duke Divinity School said a complete understanding of Tammi's teachings will require decades of research, with particularly close scrutiny given to the dozens of detailed illustrations.
Explaining the difficulty of interpreting the texts, McCormick cited a passage that reads: "Saith Tammi, 'Consider ye this on the forgiveness of one's enemies: Let he who would slander you sup at your table, let he who would inflict…I saith unto thee: Look upon mine eyes, which dwell within mine head, and not upon mine bosom, wherein no wisdom dwells.' And then did Tammi snappeth her fingers together, saying, 'Seriously; I doth mean it. Up here.'"
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Corvino: The invention of marriage
Corvino: The invention of marriage
Once upon a time, in a land far away, a Council of Elders convened to ponder the challenges of human relationships. Noticing that male-female relationships frequently involve sex, and that sex often makes babies, this “Relationship Council” decided that an institution was needed to regulate adults’ behavior for children’s benefit. Thus marriage was invented.
The Relationship Council is, of course, a figment of my imagination. But not just mine, apparently: conservative opponents of marriage equality often seem to believe in something very much like it.
I’m referring to their tendency to speak of THE purpose of marriage, as if this rich social institution had one unitary, fixed, transcultural and transhistorical purpose—a single problem which it was designed to solve—rather than arising, as human social institutions typically do, in a far messier way.
So for example, in their recent cover story “The Case for Marriage,” the editors of National Review confidently declare, “The reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children.”
Not “a” reason, or even “the most important” reason, but THE reason. The Relationship Council must have declared it so.
An even stronger version of this implicit myth suggests that marriage was not invented at all, but rather discovered, much as one might discover blood types or other natural divisions. On this view, our legal and social institution of marriage merely tracks something already present. Assuming that it does so correctly, alterations to it would not merely be unwise—they would embody a kind of falsehood. (The National Review editors, like most conservative commentators on the issue, seem to vacillate between the weaker and stronger myth.)
Needless to say, I find this understanding of marriage absurd, both philosophically and historically. Whatever else it is, marriage is an evolving social institution. Like virtually every other, it has multiple overlapping purposes—most of which reinforce one another, some of which exist in tension. (Compare, for example, modern marriages of choice with traditional European arranged marriages.)
But the myth gets worse. For it appears that the Relationship Council’s ultimate concern wasn’t about children at all, since infertile heterosexual couples may marry whereas same-sex couples—even those with children—may not. Why not? According to the National Review editors (who sound an awful lot like Princeton’s Robert P. George):
“The philosophical answer boils down to the observation that it is mating that gives marriage its orientation toward children. An infertile couple can mate even if it cannot procreate. Two men or two women literally cannot mate.”
Got that? Marriage is for mating.
The idea that marriage=mating looks even worse when you consider its implications. It implies that married heterosexual couples who are having sex but aren’t “mating”—because, for example, they’re engaging in orgasmic oral sex, or because they’re using contraception—are pursuing a kind of “counterfeit” intimacy.
But wait, there’s more. Imagine a heterosexual couple, deeply in love, where the male is paralyzed from the waist down. Can this couple marry?
They cannot, on this view, for they cannot “mate.” Thus the male’s sexual stimulation of the female could achieve no more than “an impermissible illusion of (a counterfeit experience of) true one-flesh union, not its reality,” as one of George’s students recently put it to me.
This view of marriage is not just false. It’s not just foolish. It’s inhumane.
If this were all, it would be bad enough. But as if they wanted to make extra-sure that their argument was unsound, the National Review editors did not rest content merely with a false premise (namely, that the purpose of marriage is “mating”). That would have been too easy. Instead, they took that false premise, and proceeded to draw an invalid inference from it. That is, they argued from what is not true to what does not follow.
Purely for the sake of argument, let us grant that the purpose of marriage is mating. Indeed, let us grant that this is obviously so, as obvious as that ears are for hearing.
It is simply a non-sequitur to move from that premise to the conclusion that marriage may never be used for other purposes, such as recognizing, fortifying and protecting same-sex couples and their families.
After all, ears are for hearing, but they are also quite useful for keeping one’s eyeglasses from slipping down one’s nose. They can do that even for those who do not or cannot use them to hear (i.e. the deaf).
Securing their eyeglasses is something the National Review editors ought to try. For then they might better see what is crystal-clear to growing numbers of Americans: Same-sex couples, too, have needs that marriage serves well, and society has an interest in promoting stable family units for all its members. Even those whose sex doesn’t count as “mating.”
John Corvino, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Friday, September 24, 2010
"Sweet Brother"
This is Thomas Merton's elegy for his younger brother, John Paul, who died after having been shot down over the North Sea in April 1943. John Paul's neck was broken, and he died while lying in the bottom of the dinghy into which other crewman had pulled him. Merton writes in The Seven Storey Mountain, in the very last pages of the book:
Merton wrote the poem while at Gethsemani Abbey. It's sad and beautiful:
He was terribly thirsty. He kept asking for water. But they didn't have any. The water tank had broken in the crash, and the water was all gone.
It did not last too long. He had three hours of it, and then he died....
On the fourth day they had buried John Paul at sea.
Merton wrote the poem while at Gethsemani Abbey. It's sad and beautiful:
‘For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943’
Sweet brother, if I do not sleep
My eyes are flowers for your tomb;
And if I cannot eat my bread,
My fasts shall live like willows where you died.
If in the heat I find no water for my thirst,
My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller.
Where, in what desolate and smokey country,
Lies your poor body, lost and dead?
And in what landscape of disaster
Has your unhappy spirit lost its road?
Come, in my labor find a resting place
And in my sorrows lay your head,
Or rather take my life and blood
And buy yourself a better bed—
Or take my breath and take my death
And buy yourself a better rest.
When all the men of war are shot
And flags have fallen into dust,
Your cross and mine shall tell men still
Christ died on each, for both of us.
For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring:
The money of Whose tears shall fall
Into your weak and friendless hand,
And buy you back to your own land:
The silence of Whose tears shall fall
Like bells upon your alien tomb.
Hear them and come: they call you home.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
The Big Book Manuscript
From Mockingbird blog today:
I wrote in the comments over there that I'd noticed something really interesting in the WaPo article: that by far the most frequent edit in the manuscript, and the obvious (to me) focus, lay in the excising of the word "you" in favor of the word "we." What's really far more interesting to me, though, was this: the writer of the WaPo article didn't even mention this!
I just recently posted some of this on this blog, but will quote again from the splendid pamphlet published by A.A. General Services called "A Member's-Eye View of A.A." (which can be found in PDF form online:
And the writer of the pamphlet seems to have gotten that exactly right - even though it's unlikely he ever saw the manuscript itself.
Really: this is grace....
Coming Soon: The Original Manuscript of AA's Big Book
From yesterday's Washington Post, an article about the publication of the original, annotated Big Book entitled "AA Original Manuscript Reveals Profound Debate Over Religion." We couldn't have asked for a better advertisement for our recent publication Grace in Addiction: What The Church Can Learn From Alcoholics Anonymous, which picks up the topic and runs with it! (Speaking of Grace in Addiction, it's available for 25% off until Sept 30th). A few excerpts from the article - avoid the metafiler comments if you know what's good for you:
After being hidden away for nearly 70 years and then auctioned twice, the original manuscript by AA co-founder Bill Wilson is about to become public for the first time next week, complete with edits by Wilson-picked commenters that reveal a profound debate in 1939 about how overtly to talk about God. The group's decision to use "higher power" and "God of your understanding" instead of "God" or "Jesus Christ" and to adopt a more inclusive tone was enormously important in making the deeply spiritual text accessible to the non-religious and non-Christian, AA historians and treatment experts say.
But the crossed-out phrases and scribbles make clear that the words easily could have read differently. And the edits embody a debate that continues today: How should the role of spirituality and religion be handled in addiction treatment? They also take readers back to an era when churches and society generally stigmatized alcohol addicts as immoral rather than ill. The AA movement's reframing of addiction as having a physical component (the "doctor's opinion" that opens the book calls it "a kind of allergy") was revolutionary, experts say.
"We didn't have any knowledge then about the brain. Today we know there is a neurological component, we know there are spiritual, psychological and environmental components," said Joseph Califano, founder of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
Despite objections from some secularists, experts generally believe that "there is a significant spiritual component for the overwhelming majority of people" coming out of addiction to alcohol and drugs, Califano said. The question was - and is - in what way? The notes in the margins of the manuscript make clear there was disagreement, and even Wilson was torn.
I wrote in the comments over there that I'd noticed something really interesting in the WaPo article: that by far the most frequent edit in the manuscript, and the obvious (to me) focus, lay in the excising of the word "you" in favor of the word "we." What's really far more interesting to me, though, was this: the writer of the WaPo article didn't even mention this!
I just recently posted some of this on this blog, but will quote again from the splendid pamphlet published by A.A. General Services called "A Member's-Eye View of A.A." (which can be found in PDF form online:
Long before there was a definition of A.A., before there was a book or Steps or Traditions or a program of recovery, there was a night in Akron, Ohio, only a short 33 years ago. (1935). A night when a man named Bill W., alone in a strange city, shaken and frightened, concluded that his only hope of maintaining his present hard-won sobriety was to talk to and try to help another alcoholic. So far as I know, that is the first recorded instance where one alcoholic consciously and deliberately turned to another alcoholic, not to drink with, but to stay sober with.
In the fateful meeting of Bill W. and Doctor Bob the next evening, was an answer finally given to that rhetorical question which Christ asked two thousand years ago? "If the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into the pit?" And in 1935 was the answer, strangely enough, "No"? But perhaps what occurred that evening was not a contradiction of Christ's maxim. Perhaps one who was a little less blind, one who was at last able to discern vague shapes and forms, described what he saw to one who still lived in total darkness.
Much more important than what was said that evening was who was saying it. Long before the average alcoholic walks through the doors of his first A.A. meeting, he has sought help from others or help has been offered to him, in some instances even forced upon him. But these helpers are always superior beings: spouses, parents, physicians, employers, priests, ministers, rabbis, swamis, judges, policemen, even bartenders. The moral culpability of the alcoholic and the moral superiority of the helper, even though unstated, are always clearly understood. The overtone of parental disapproval and discipline in these authority figures is always present. For the first time, 33 years ago an alcoholic suddenly heard a different drummer. Instead of the constant and menacing rat-a-tat-tat of "This is what you should do," he heard an instantly recognizable voice saying, "This is what I did."
I am personally convinced that the basic search of every human being, from the cradle to the grave, is to find at least one other human being before whom he can stand completely naked, stripped of all pretense or defense, and trust that person not to hurt him, because that other person has stripped himself naked, too. This lifelong search can begin to end with the first A.A. encounter.
And the writer of the pamphlet seems to have gotten that exactly right - even though it's unlikely he ever saw the manuscript itself.
Really: this is grace....
Cows Photo, Nature Wallpaper – National Geographic Photo of the Day
Cows Photo, Nature Wallpaper – National Geographic Photo of the Day.
So sue me: I like cows and find this image peaceful....
So sue me: I like cows and find this image peaceful....
Monday, September 20, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
"A short excerpt from Heinerich Heine"
Via Mockingbird. Not sure exactly where this comes from, but it's immensely powerful. (Thought I'd posted it before, but it seems not.....)
See also Robb's most recent post; also immensely powerful. The image, taken together with the quote (“Keep your eyes on the crucifix; for Jesus Christ without the cross is a man without a mission, and the cross without Jesus is a burden without a reliever.” - Fulton Sheen), really blows you away.
"So all day long until the sun went down
they spent in feasting, and the measured feast
matched well their hearts' desire.
So did the flawless harp held by Apollo
and heavenly songs in choiring antiphon
that all the Muses sang. [taken by Heine from the Vulgate]
"Then suddenly a pale, bloodstained Jew came panting in, with a crown of thorns on his head and a great wooden cross over his shoulder; and he threw the cross on to the gods' high table, so that the golden goblets trembled, and the gods fell silent and turned pale, and became paler and paler, till at last they entirely dissolved into mist.
"... Anyone who sees his god suffering finds it easier to endure his own pain. The merry gods of the past, who felt no pain, did not know either how poor tortured human beings feel, and a poor person in desperation could have no real confidence in them. They were holiday gods; people danced around them merrily, and could only thank them. For this reason they never received whole-hearted love. To receive whole-hearted love one must suffer. Compassion is the last sacrament of love; it may be love itself. Therefore of all the gods who ever lived, Christ is the god who has been loved the most."
See also Robb's most recent post; also immensely powerful. The image, taken together with the quote (“Keep your eyes on the crucifix; for Jesus Christ without the cross is a man without a mission, and the cross without Jesus is a burden without a reliever.” - Fulton Sheen), really blows you away.
The Online State of Nature | Big Questions Online
The Online State of Nature | Big Questions Online:
Sometimes our behavior in the “real world” can illuminate the puzzles of online experience. Consider this little contretemps: John Sentamu, the Anglican Archbishop of York, recently said that it is time for people to stop attacking Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the leader of the Church of England:
It deeply saddens me that there is not only a general disregard for the truth, but a rapacious appetite for “carelessness” compounded by spin, propaganda, and the resort to misleading opinions paraded as fact, regarding a remarkable, gifted, and much-maligned Christian leader. . . . I say, enough is enough. May we all possess a high regard for the truth.
Sentamu’s frustration emerges from several years of the “Anglican wars,” an ongoing conflict that is highly illustrative for people who want to understand why we all cannot get along, especially online. (For those of you who couldn't pick an Anglican bishop out of a police line-up in Guangzhou, please bear with me. What I have to say is also relevant to you also.)
A couple of years ago, I was visiting an Anglican blog, as was then my habit, and came across an article in which a theological conservative — that is, someone on “my side” of the Anglican debate, if (God help us) we must speak in such terms — was accusing Archbishop Williams of something like complete epistemological skepticism, effective unbelief. I have heard many of my fellow conservatives speak of Williams in this way. I thought that if they were to read what he writes, or listen to what he preaches — this magnificent sermon, for instance — they would no longer speak of him so dismissively. I wrote a comment on this post, challenging the critique of Williams and linking to sermons, talks, and essays that demonstrated beyond any doubt that the charge of skepticism was false.
None of this convinced the author of the article or other commenters. The general conviction was that Williams had not acted decisively for conservative causes, especially regarding sexuality, and therefore that anything he said or wrote that savored of theological orthodoxy amounted to protective coloration at best and outright deceit at worst. In their minds, he was the enemy of orthodoxy and therefore their enemy, and could be granted the benefit of no doubt. (Never mind that on liberal Anglican blogs he was simultaneously being condemned for having sold out to the forces of right-wing reaction. And never mind what Jesus said about loving your enemies, even assuming that Williams really is an “enemy.”) They believed that Williams was wrong and had to be resisted by all available means, tarred by any brush at hand. My response to this attitude is summed up perfectly in Archbishop Sentamu’s lament about a “general disregard for the truth.”
The author and commenters bristled at my critique. I bristled right back. The argument escalated. At one point, I said to myself, “All right, you want to play hardball, we’ll play hardball” — and I would have cut loose and said exactly what I wanted to say, except that at that moment my hands were shaking too violently for me to type accurately. I looked at my trembling fingers for a moment. Then I closed that browser tab and spent a few minutes removing all Anglican-related blogs from my bookmarks and my RSS reader. I stopped reading those blogs and have never looked at them again to this day. I don't think I’ve ever made a better decision.
A now-famous cartoon on the xkcd “webcomics” site shows a stick figure typing away at his computer keyboard as a voice from outside the frame says, “Are you coming to bed?” The figure replies: “I can’t. This is important. . . . Someone is wrong on the Internet.” I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.
Late modernity’s sense of itself is built upon achievements in justice. This is especially true of Americans. When we look back over the past century, what do we take pride in? Suffrage for women, the defeat of fascism, Brown vs. Board of Education, civil rights and especially voting rights for African-Americans. If you’re on one side of the political spectrum, you might add the demise of the Soviet empire; if you’re on the other side, you might add the expansion of rights for gays and lesbians. (Or you might add both.) The key point is that all of these are achievements in justice.
Someone might object: well, of course — those are political accomplishments, and politics is, or ought to be, largely about the pursuit of justice. That’s right, as far as it goes, but it overlooks the key variable that has changed in the late modern world: the dramatic increase in the information available to us about political action. We simply know more about politics, in all of its dimensions, than our ancestors ever could have.
In the 18th century, when modern political journalism was just beginning, Samuel Johnson wrote: “How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Johnson wrote as someone who, as a young man, had observed and commented extensively on debates in Parliament. But few of us would agree with him today. We expect our laws and kings — that is, our politicians and the state — to try to cure or avert a great many of the hardships that “human hearts endure.”
And so, as we have come to focus our attention ever more on politics and the arts of public justice, we have increasingly defined our private, familial, and communal lives in similar terms. The pursuit of justice has come to define acts and experiences that once were governed largely by other virtues. It is this particular transformation that Wendell Berry was lamenting when he wrote, “Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.” That is, it has become a matter of justice rather than of love, an assertion of rights rather than a self-giving.
This same logic governs our responses to one another on the Internet. We clothe ourselves in the manifest justice of our favorite causes, and so clothed we cannot help being righteous (“Someone is wrong on the Internet”). In our online debates, we not only fail to cultivate charity and humility, we come to think of them as vices: forms of weakness that compromise our advocacy. And so we go forth to war with one another.
This comes close to what Thomas Hobbes, writing four centuries ago, famously called the “war of every man against every man.” As he pointed out, such a war may begin in the name of justice, but justice cannot long survive its depredations. In such an environment, “this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. . . . Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”
No wonder that Archbishop Sentamu cries out, “May we all possess a high regard for the truth.” And no wonder that he cries in vain.
Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College. He writes the Text Patterns blog.
"God loves broken things...."
From "The Living Church": Apolitical Inclusion at St. Thomas the Apostle Church, Hollywood. And something for everybody:
Using a two-sides-of-the-coin approach — traditional liturgy and social outreach — St. Thomas the Apostle Church, Hollywood, has found success in a transitory neighborhood and an often anti-religious culture. In the process, it has become a model for catechetical training, new-member retention and fundraising.
“If you want snobby ‘privileged at prayer’ go to Beverly Hills,” said longtime parishioner Michael Ensign. “We’re a funny little outpost at Hollywood and Gardner; a real ship of fools. But we’re clear about who we are. We’re messy and very human, but in messiness is God.”
Ensign has been at the church for 22 years. He is a career actor and veteran of too many movies and television series to list (including Big Love, CSI, and Boston Legal).
“It doesn’t feel like every other place,” Ensign said. “The incense is thick, and everybody loves to sing. We pray like Catholics and sing like Baptists. But it’s not just some esoteric Sunday morning show. St. Thomas is active. We figure, if we don’t do it here, it won’t be done. We find people are looking for what we do.”
The Traditional
St. Thomas proudly declares itself the only Anglo-Catholic parish of any size in Los Angeles. The otherworldly quality of traditional liturgy — including weekly Latin Mass with Gregorian chant — appeals to parishioners’ dramatic side. The rector, the Rev. Ian Elliott Davies, restored the altar to an eastward-facing position and celebrates Mass with his back to the congregation in lieu of “the bartending position.”
Ensign recalls UCLA students fascinated by the celebration — as opposed to “‘that old hippy crap our parents like.’ One guy had never seen a pipe organ,” Ensign said. “For us baby boomers what was so meaningful, relevant, and rebellious is so old hat. What’s old is new again.”
The Not-So-Traditional
St. Thomas has a tradition of social activism in the surrounding area, including among the homeless in Hollywood and gay and lesbian residents of West Hollywood.
Its bimonthly “homeless breakfast club” was the first (and only) faith-based community to win a grant from the city of West Hollywood. It does referrals, and is developing a medical component that includes screenings, flu shots, and foot care. The parish also hosts 12-step programs in its hall.
“We also prepare lunches for the county HIV/AIDS clinic,” Fr. Davies said. “Parishioners take 200 lunches downtown to the University of Southern California hospital, to serve those waiting in line for testing and treatment. We collaborate with 30 other synagogues and churches. Each takes one day a month.”
“But Propostion 8 [California’s marriage amendment] has never been preached about,” Ensign said. “Preaching is always gospel-centered and Scripture-based. We’re here to worship Almighty God. If you want to be political, join a political group.”
A Remote Mission
In 1906 two missionary nuns visited the Rt. Rev. Joseph H. Johnson, Bishop of Los Angeles, to request a church for Hollywood. “It’s just orange groves and avocado trees,” the bishop purportedly responded. “I doubt very much anyone will ever live there.” The sisters settled on “doubting” St. Thomas as a patron.
The parish formed in 1912, and was admitted to the diocese in 1920. The neighborhood exploded in the next decade. An architect from the National Cathedral project designed a magnificent building. Then the Great Depression hit, and construction stalled at the nave (which still exists today). The area went middle class after World War II, suffered an influx of apartments and transitory inhabitants, and by the 1960s and 1970s was synonymous with sleaze and drugs.
Enter Father Barbour
“I got suckered in by Fr. Carroll Barbour,” Ensign admitted. “Urban legend goes: in the early 1980s St. Thomas was downgraded to mission status. The bishop called Fr. Barbour in — then in his late 50s, and serving in Long Beach, with a checkered past, and history of alcoholism — and said, basically, it was make or break for both.
“He took the parish Anglo-Catholic in theology, teaching, and ritual, and threw the doors wide open,” Ensign said. “He held his ground when parishioners left, then went to work. There was little money, no answering machine, let alone a secretary. No organ, no choir. Just a mock English gothic building in a so-so location.
“He was a little guy from North Carolina; a real jackass,” Ensign said. “But he was no-nonsense, and a real priest. Not a social worker, or politician; always humbled by the altar. The priesthood was most important in his life.
“He was a broken man. He often said, ‘God loves broken things. We break bread, and broken people are ready to listen,’” Ensign recalled. “He had a special spirituality of suffering.
“The church is a hospital for sinners and not a country club for the saved,” he said. “The church exemplified that. At a time of fear and trembling about HIV/AIDS, he became the first mainline clergyman to deliberately minister to the community.
“Lots of heartbreaking stuff: people coming up for communion with walkers, or pushing IV stands,” Ensign said. “He’d be on the pulpit: ‘I was up all night with so-and-so. He died, but had a good death.’”
The parish averaged one requiem Mass weekly, peaking at 11 in one month. “We joked it was supported by funeral fees,” Ensign said. St. Thomas quickly began interring ashes in the walls. Fr. Barbour built a chapel honoring Fr. Damien of Molokai, a 19th-century Roman Catholic Belgian who ministered to Hawaiian leper colonies. He is the patron for people with infectious diseases. The chapel has an AIDS memorial book, and Damien is honored alongside Saint Thomas at every Mass.
“In the same breath Fr. Barbour was so inclusive,” Ensign said. “He’d say: ‘I’m the worst sinner here. So get over anyone being over anyone else. That really resonated.”
Liver damage forced him out in 2000. His 2003 death made the front page of the Los Angeles Times, with a photo above the fold, and a full-page obituary inside. He was posthumously honored citywide.
The Congregation
The parish enjoys unique advantages. Hollywood Boulevard attracts thousands of tourists from around the world. Tour buses regularly pass the church. Both Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (of sidewalk handprint fame) and the Kodak Theater (home to the Academy Awards) are within a mile. Neighborhood home prices are middle-class, and rising.
But “L.A. is huge,” said Fr. Davies, who arrived in 2002 from All Saints Margaret Street, in London. “The freeways are packed all hours. People travel upwards of 60 miles for work and never meet anyone other than coworkers. It’s very disengaged.”
The congregation includes African Americans, and Asian, Latino and Caribbean immigrants. “But on the whole it is white,” Fr. Davies said. “Gay, straight, confused, whatever; probably 20 to 30 percent straight. Many former Roman Catholic monks and nuns, who find St. Thomas a helpful staging post in their personal journeys. Education is high — doctors, lawyers, teachers — mostly upper middle class. Some are wealthy indeed, and some wander in off the streets.”
St. Thomas “has a long history as an actor’s church,” Ensign said. Shelley Winters and Marilyn Monroe stopped in regularly. Rita Hayworth was married at St. Thomas, as was David Carradine, who was also baptized there. “Dorthy Lamour and Lana Turner — unfortunately, none wanted to make us rich.”
The tradition continues today, Ensign said. “Illeana Douglas, Robert Patrick, and Glynis Johns, plus others who don’t like their names out there. There’s 15 to 16 in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Plus, a lot of wannabe actors.”
Parishioner David Bomba is a scenic designer, who devoted his talents to the 1919 California-bungalow rectory. It previously served as a school, sexton’s quarters, and parish office, before Fr. Davies moved in.
“Fluorescent lights and linoleum; everything painted over,” Ensign said. Bomba “took it to 1919, with period moldings and lighting. He also incorporated leftover pieces from films: wallpaper from Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood; a tabletop Barbara Streisand provided; a bed from a Kevin Bacon movie.”
St. Thomas is not an easy community to join, but it’s not exclusive, either. In its catechumenate, 10 to 12 new parishioners meet every Saturday morning for nine months to discern their individual Christian vocations. The parish has an 82 percent retention rate.
“We take newcomers very seriously,” Ensign said. At Mass, “they stand, and get a little red bag, with a mug and brochure. It helps identify them at coffee hour, afterward. They also tour the building.” Follow-up includes monthly orientation, attention from a greeters and newcomers committee, and regular newcomer dinners.
“We do an [annual] every-member canvas,” Fr. Davies said. “All parishioners are visited by teams, for brunch, lunch or at least a coffee. We chat: What is parish life like? Where are you growing? What should we emphasize? Nobody gets a pledge card until their meeting.”
“We’ve found that people are looking for and hungry for a feeling of God,” Ensign said. “They yearn for connection with that which is greater and more meaningful than themselves. Especially in a place like L.A., that is transitory and schizophrenic.
“Everyone’s here to make it. If you don’t, you go back where you came from,” he said. “While you are who you are, you’re also a product. One day they want you, the next they don’t. There’s a great spiritual need for purpose and identity outside show business. St. Thomas is an oasis.”
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Tweet the Pope
You must - you must - grab the Ship of Fools Twitter feed to follow along with the Pope's visit to Great Britain. Some juicy tweets indeed, including:
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott
A lovely arrangement! Not sure about its provenance, but it's wonderful; listen all the way through.
HT Dan.
HT Dan.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
And optimism?
A visitor to my blog, Wayward Disciple, wrote the following comment - I love it completely - in response to my previous post quoting from the article "A Pessimist Manifesto":
Isn't that terrific?
I find this amusing. Yes, I think we have a duty to be cheerfully pessimistic. Chesterton wrote that the optimist says, "the situation is serious, but not hopeless", while the Christian says, "the situation is hopeless, but not serious".
Isn't that terrific?
"A Pessimist Manifesto"
I'm not sure how or why I started reading the "Modeled Behavior" blog - it seems to be mostly about economics, about which I know next to nothing, so it's a good education anyway. Here's a post from yesterday that I really like:
A "fallen world"?
One odd empirical regularity is that hard-nosed, pessimistic, realist, free-market guys like myself seem to spend more time agreeing with soggy Liberals than with the Conservatives who supposedly share our worldview.
Part of that has to do with the success of the general Libertarian project, as Scott Sumner outlines here. Many free market ideas have now simply become conventional wisdom among wonks of all stripes.
Partially , however, I think it is that many modern Conservatives intuitively base their analysis of the world on a philosophy is that anathema to my worldview. Their view is that if you take a responsible, measured, well-reasoned approach to the world things will work out. Failure is thus a sign that you have not done that.
My sense is that this is fundamentally crap.
First of all things are not going to work out. You are going to die. Your friends and family are going to die. Everything you care about and everything you ever worked for will be destroyed. This story, our story, only has one ending and it is death and destruction.
If you don’t recognize that, you are living in a fantasy world.
Second, even in the short term your plans almost certainly won’t work out. Most ideas are bad ideas and there are infinitely more ways to fuck something up than to get it right.
To wit, clean living is not some form of salvation. Nor, is prudence assurance that that you and your loved ones will be okay. Suffering is inevitable and the best one can say is that it hasn’t happened to me – yet.
Bad things happen because badness is the natural state of the world. If something good ever happens count yourself lucky and be aware that this too shall pass.
Thus, I see our proper mission as easing pain, where we can, to the extent we can, the best we can. This is best done up close and personal where you are mostly likely to quickly notice if your efforts to help are actually doing harm.
It is best done with a respect and reverence for the power of self-organizing systems, spontaneous order and the resilience of natural equilibria.
Its best done slowly, and in baby steps, building upon the wisdom of the past.
And, most importantly it is best done with humility, knowing that in all cases that, “but for
the grace of Godpure heartless luck, there would go I”
Its this last part that I think many modern Conservatives miss in their conviction that everything would be okay if it were for those meddling Liberals. Everything would not be okay. It never will be. If we do our best it might, and I mean might, be a little bit better.
A "fallen world"?
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