Put The Earth In A Jar

Today I have a guest post up on Theolog, the Christian Century‘s blog. It’s my two cents on how we should really be celebrating Earth Day.  You’ll have to head on over there to read the full story: For Earth Day, put the earth in a jar.

The Focus on the Family Guide to Idolatrous Christmas Consumerism

Focus on the Family has publicized their Stand For Christmas website which checks the usage of the word "Christmas" at various retailers.

Focus on the Family explicitly states why the stand for the word "Christmas" is so important for Christians:

In response to the secularization of Christmas and the trend of censoring public references to this time-honored holiday, Focus on the Family and Focus on the Family Action began to speak out on the issue in 2007.

We soon discovered that citizens across the nation were growing dissatisfied with the tendency of corporations to omit references to "Christmas" from holiday promotions. Many said they preferred to patronize retailers that recognized the reason so many Americans exchange gifts at Christmastime.

Thus, we set out to assist you, the consumer.

There is no veil over Focus on the Family’s perception of the meaning of Christmas.  We are not worshipers, we are not celebrators, we are not the continuance of the incarnation….NO, our role as true Christians during this season is to 1) never waver from using the word Christmas as much as possible and 2) consume.

This view of Christmas is completely un-Christian.  It makes the word "Christmas" an idol, some kind of special totem word that carries magical significance even if the very thing it is pasted onto, catalogs and advertisements, are completely anti-thetical to Christmas.  The absurd reasoning that Holiday=secular but Christmas=holy is an immature approach to language in general.  How can a word that means holy days be "secular"?

One thing for sure is secular though: the bastardization of Christmas that Focus on the Family wants you to celebrate, a Christmas that focuses not on the Holy Family or your own family at all but instead on an immoral and un-Christian materialistic orgy of consumption that chips away at the foundation of families, communities and the environment.

So to truly focus on your family this year, don’t take a word of Focus on the Family’s advise and instead celebrate Christmas in a religious way: by caring about your family and the celebration of the incarnation far more than buying things out of catalogs and grabbing sales at shopping malls.

Go To The Source

I just finished glancing thru the latest IVP Academic catalog full of great books that interest me.  In particular three books by the theologian Christopher A. Hall struck me as essential reads: Learning Theology with the Church Fathers, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers, and Worshiping with the Church Fathers. I was going to place an order for them on Amazon.com and I had an epiphany: haven’t you read enough about the church fathers?

I have indeed.  I love reading about the church fathers and their thoughts and ideas.  I just think it might be time to set aside the "about" and actually read the church fathers first hand in more detail.

Commentary can only go so far…

So I am going to start reading the church fathers and will be blogging about them in an ongoing series of responses.  We’ll see how far or long lasting this is, but I hope it can continue for a couple years as I pause in my reading about the church fathers to actually read them in greater detail.

Gunslingers, Quakers, and Redemptive Violence

In the critically acclaimed genre stalwart High Noon, Gary Cooper plays Will Kane, a town sheriff who learns of the release of a murderous, bloodthirsty villain named Frank Miller the same day he marries a Quaker woman and promises to retire his badge and lead a simple, peaceful life as a shopkeeper.

Conflicted about the release of Frank Miller, Kane decides to stop the horses, get back to town, and defeat Frank Miller once and for all.

But, in the years since Frank Miller went away to jail, the town so united by their victory over the ruthless criminal has now become a town more excited by money and good times than by justice, equity, and community.  This is the world Kane has policed for so many years, and even though he is often told he doesn’t need to protect them, there is a new sheriff coming tomorrow, and it’d be best he just went away to avoid trouble Kane nonetheless stays to protect the town.  

The town, so numb to guns and violence, wants no part in just another shooting.  No one will join a posse to round up Miller again, so Kane decides to go it his own. This whole time, Grace Kelly’s wonderfully played Mrs. Kane, only a half hour after her wedding to this man, finds herself sitting in a hotel waiting for a train to take her to St. Louis and divorce (has to be a record).  Mrs. Kane, as a Quaker, is a pacifist and cannot accept her new husband carrying around a gun, let alone being motivated to use it once more.  She sits, perplexed and conflicted, in the hotel counting down the hours until the noon train.

[Spoiler Alert] Here in lies the myth of redemptive violence, when Kane must face down four armed men in the town center to defend his pride (now thoroughly hubris and self-deception).  It is insane to protect a town that does not want you around, even more insane to make a rash decision that leads to your wife wanting a divorce after a half hour of marriage, and most insane to go against men four to one.  And the myth is this: Kane wins.  He shoots three of the men after the noon train comes in an elongated shootout that starts as his wife is leaving for St. Louis.  She runs off the train thinking she will find her husband’s dead body, yet instead finds one of the villains.  Her husband has killed.  Instead of becoming infuriated and running back for the train, Mrs. Kane grabs a gun and shoots a villain in the back, giving her husband the chance he needs to finally defeat Frank Miller with a spree of bullets, sending him to his death.

Violence has brought peace, and the couple that was on the brink of divorce is united in the defeat of the forces that would have separated them, and they ride off into the sunset leaving the cowardly townspeople in their dust.

There is another way to read the end of this story, one that deconstructs the myth of redemptive violence.  This myth says violence is the only way to assure peace.  Unfortunately the peace the Kane’s find is one that is hollow and individualistic instead of uniting.  Peace should be a uniting force, yet in the Western peace is not the salvation of a community as much as the use of violence as a will too power.  The individual leaves only when they have exerted their will upon a place and exercised hubris as the only moral authority (watch Appaloosa, a movie that features the town’s laws being actually signed over to the hired guns).

Riding off into the sunset is a symbol of individualism at all costs, and the cost is community.  There are a few movies, like The Magnificent Seven, where morality is not tied to economy but tied to justice, and the hired guns slowly become part of the peaceful community and the violence at the end of the film is defense, not mercenaries.  One of the guns even stays behind and becomes incorporated into the community.  The traditional western ethos is one of violence assures peace, and the approval of a Quaker going against her religion and a prideful man gunning down villians when he had no real legal authority or need to do so is a celebrated act.  This act can be turned on its head though as the couple leaves the town immediately and sets off for the sunset.  Violence is always an act of separation, and though violence has brought the Kanes together once more it separates them from the community.  Peace, as any Quaker can tell you, is an act of unity and community.  Peace brings unity, even if it enters the gray area of defense as in The Magnificent Seven.  Redemptive violence is tragic because it only gives peace to one of the parties, and the other party is left dead or in ruins, as in war, revenge, and retaliation.  The Kanes may look safe and sound and ready to enjoy their honeymoon, but they leave a town with four dead bodies and a broken moral compass, a town that on the outside looks a lot like what’s on their inside: persons who have compromised their integrity, religion, and morality for the sake of "peace."

The Office, Comedy and Idleness

Much to the chagrin of my wife, I try to watch media that is informing and artistic.  She does not find black and white movies from the 1950s to be relaxing.  Whether it’s a natural fondness for engaging intellectually and critically with everything or years of steady brainwashing by academic institutions, I see utterly no value in media that has no critical value.

I am a big fan of Wendell Berry, but he and other agrarian or traditionally minded folk tend to be Luddites when it comes to films and television shows.  I disagree with them on the point that, from a more postmodern perspective, all should be treated as text: whether book, movie, or television, and just because one spends their time reading and not watching television does not make them a better person or a more engaged individual.  There are plenty of escapist and gossipy books out there (the publishing world could not survive without them) that take no more engagement to participate with than American Idol or Wipeout! For me, the discerning factor is not what medium you are participating with, but how you are participating with it: critically or uncritically.

So with television or film viewing comes the self-critique I place on myself: "can I think critically about this? Can I reflect on an aspect of this?" 

With summer heat finally coming to New Jersey, Sarah and I have been watching more television to stay out of the heat.  We’ve been going through the seasons of the hit comedy The Office.  While it is downright hilarious, I have not been able to really approach it critically.  I have not been able to place any value on it other than being funny.  This has been making me feel a bit guilty for watching it.  I feel, well, idle.  And Idleness is not a good thing.

This feeling is compounded by the fact that much of the hilarity that ensues on The Office is caused by idleness.  When the character Jim accomplishes more at work while participating in office Olympics than on a regular day, you know that the corporate American situation is one of differed productivity and idleness with frenzied morning and end of day pace.  Generally speaking, this comes from American business’ gross misunderstanding of productivity as equal to time spent at work rather than the amount of work accomplished.  People often talk about how they work long hours, but no one ever mentions what they are actually doing during those long hours spent toiling the soil of the cubicle farm.

So, although I have begun a critique of American work ethic from watching the show, it still brings up the general problem of comedy, which is a parallel situation between the American work ethic and the critique of media, which is as we have equated time instead of effort with productivity, so too us critics have equated seriousness with art instead of comedy.  Comedy is treated like an ugly stepchild to art, as can be seen in how best film awards are always dolled out—when was the last time a comedy won an Oscar? (1977, according to filmsite.org).  Comedy, if done well, and done creatively, is entertaining because of its creative genius primarily with all other things secondary.  Critics, including myself, are taught to shun entertainment as pedantic—you must work while watching a film or reading a book, not necessarily enjoy it.  Yet the chief quality of a comedy is its ability to entertain, and with that one must not feel idle but instead look to how a comedy entertains as it’s chief merit.

The Office, thankfully, is a comedy of creative genius.  Good, meaningful comedies rely on the spoken word and literary devices such as irony and wordplay, not on crashes, booms, punches, naughty words or groin shots (think early Adam Sandler movies).  Good comedy is thus an art of language capable of the same multiplicity of meaning as good dramas or epic stories.

Further, while we have learned from our culture to place comedy on a lower pole than drama or epics in art, the Christian should look to good comedy as work, for we should view work differently.  We are taught to equate work with seriousness and comedy with goofing off and idleness, but a proper understanding of work and vocation should allow us the opportunity to enjoy our work—or, work should be a type of enjoyment or entertainment.  We should see as implicity to a healthy view of life a vocation of delight in goodness and creativity, no matter what forms it comes in.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

I, like many people, have had my interest piqued by the brouhaha surrounding the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.  There is a ton of spin and politicking going on around and not wanting to take sides I have been watching this as a "living critique" of our culture.  What this incident defines for me is not whether we are racist or not, whether police act stupidly or not, or whether arresting someone for disorderly conduct on their own property is ethical or constitutional.  There is only one thing for certain in this mess, one problem that stands out above the quagmire: we don’t know who are neighbors are.

This incident did not happen at night.  The police report marks the initial phone call from the lady across the street as 12:44pm.  This happened in broad daylight!

Many people are justifying the right to call the police on this type of situation, but really, why were they called.  Shouldn’t you be able to recognize the person who lives across the street from you?

And later, during the verbal altercation witnessed in the police report, why is there no mention of the witness who called supporting or vouching for Dr. Gates?  Why didn’t Dr. Gates try to talk to her?  All signs point to the fact that neither Gates nor the witness really knew each other.

Not knowing the person who lives across the street from you, that’s just sad.  But that’s the state of affairs in all of America (not just the suburbs).  We have become anti-neighbor.  That’s just not a cultural fault.  We are supposed to treat everyone as a neighbor.  We as a people are failing as a culture to follow the golden rule on a daily basis in part because we are not mean, rude, belligerent, or nasty.  It’s far worse.  We are indifferent and apathetic.  We are lukewarm neighbors, ones who cannot even stop to wave or chit chat.

I might not be an all-star neighbor, but we wave, greet, or talk to one of our neighbors almost every day.  It’s only reasonable.  We know them.  We don’t help each other out much, but occasionally we do.  We’re neighbors for Pete’s sake.

The saddest part of this whole Gates ordeal is that it all could have been avoided if Gates and this woman had simply known the face of one another.  Really, think about it.  If the lady had baked a batch of cookies when Gates had moved in and said hello, or if Gates had seen her checking her mail and waved and said, "it’s a nice day today," this whole mess would have never happened.  If they had been real neighbors and not incubating denizens the complete opposite would have happened.  The lady wouldn’t have been calling the police, she would have been calling a locksmith, because that’s what neighbors do.