Shiny Things

Reading Excerpts.

[ajshinythings]

It Lives

So I have put this tumblr on the back burner for almost a year now, and was about to shut it down tonight. But a Kalamazoo Stout just convinced me otherwise. It lives. 

[ajshinythings]

A Review of "Unapologetic: Why Christianity Makes Surprising Emotional Sense"

Wrote a review of Spufford's "Unapologetic" for Curator Magazine....

Think of "Unapologetic" as a virtual reality tour of the pathways of a heart, a guided exploration of his emotive geography-€”-like explaining Christianity by starting with the Psalms.

[zac-gorman]

Airman contemplates why, if he was designed for fighting, does he have an “oscillate” button?

[ajshinythings]

The higher Christian churches--where, if anywhere, I belong--come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves wer an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.

From Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

[ajshinythings]

I wrote a piece on art, violence, politics, and pleasure for Curator Magazine. I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I'm talking, and that is what matters. Right? The whole "I speak so plants have something to do" phenomena....

[ajshinythings]

There are two dimensions of discipleship. One is the learning of habits and the forming of character, the shaping of commitments and the inscribing of rhythms, the training in disciplines and the facing of sacrifices. Some people speak as if that were the only part. But the other dimension is perhaps even more important. It is the acknowledgement of weakness, the asking for help, the naming of failure, the request for forgiveness, the desire for reconciliation, and the longing for restoration.

Samuel Wells in "Be Not Afraid of Weakness" 

[ajshinythings]

While Christians in Latin America were (rightly) calling for agency, empowerment and drastic emergency measures, Williams found himself saying almost the opposite. In British society, where Anglicanism is established, the church's task is to give away power, to divest itself of security and privilege, to use its own voice to negotiate on behalf of more vulnerable social groups. This is a sort of liberation theology in reverse: a political theology articulated from above, rather than from below.

-From "Rowan Williams and the Politics of the Empty Tomb" by Benjamin Myers

[ajshinythings]

Yes

Jesus, the hell-bent love god Never took no for a no. A yes, that makes all other yeses, look like noes, or at best, lukewarm maybes, muffled "mehs." Every word he speaks, a yes Only says no because he said yes. A heart mad with the yes, his skin wearing the red letter of the yes. His yes, the Yes of the ultimate Yes— saying yes, Oh Yes, please Yes, forever Yes. Yes, Yes, Yes.

[ajshinythings]

Okay music, awesome EP cover 

[ajshinythings]

Please note that Scott is excellent at ferreting out plagiarism, particularly the incompetent, undergraduate variety in which the writing style veers from Late Caveman to Deconstructivist within a single paragraph. Plagiarism is an expellable offense, and I am obligated to report all incidents to the Dean. Realistically, I doubt they’d expel you if your tuition check cleared, and there’s no way I’m reporting anything to the Dean. I don’t actually know who the Dean is, and the last thing I want to do is draw His attention. What I will be looking for is remorse, as expressed through tears or a certain ashen, petrified quality. I will then give you a zero on the paper, accept your gratitude stoically, and avoid making eye contact with you for the remainder of the semester.

From "My Fake College Syllabus" by Adam Mansbach in Salon

[ajshinythings]

A fellow came by my house a few years ago and I asked him, "Do you believe the Bible literally?" He responded, "Yes sir, my brother, word for word." I said, "Well, fantastic." I stood up, gave him a courtly bow and ceremoniously got my hat and cane, extended my hand and said, "I didn't know there was anyone else in the world who believed the way I do. The Bible says that the day has come to proclaim the opening of the doors of the prison and letting the captives go free. I've been looking for years to find someone who agreed with the literal interpretation of that scripture 'cause there's this prison in west Nashville and I can't tear the thing down by myself, but if there's 15 million folks out there who believe in the literal interpretation of Scripture, we can get them all together and raze that prison to the ground." He looked at me kind of funny and said, "Well now, what Jesus meant by that was..." I shouted, "Don't you go exegeting on me." He said he believed in Scripture literally. But the prison's still standing."

-From Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance by Will Campbell

[thomuchistakenmuchabides-deacti]

Or for a piece of famous fluffiness that doesn’t just pretend about what real lives can be like, but moves on into one of the world’s least convincing pretenses about what people themselves are like, consider the teased and coiffed nylon monument that is ‘Imagine’: surely the My Little Pony of philosophical statements.

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic, p. 12

He goes on to say:

“White robes, the celestial glare of over-exposed film: ‘Imagine’ looks like one part A Matter of Life and Death to one part Hymns Ancient and Modern. Only sillier” (14).

[Previously]

(via invisibleforeigner)

[ajshinythings]

The funny thing is that, to me, it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending – pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture. Take the well-known slogan on the atheist bus in London. I know, I know, that's an utterance by the hardcore hobbyists of unbelief, but in this particular case they're pretty much stating the ordinary wisdom of everyday disbelief. The atheist bus says: "There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life." All right: which word here is the questionable one, the aggressive one, the one that parts company with recognisable human experience so fast it doesn't even have time to wave goodbye? It isn't "probably". New Atheists aren't claiming anything outrageous when they say that there probably isn't a God. In fact they aren't claiming anything substantial at all, because, really, how would they know? It's as much of a guess for them as it is for me. No, the word that offends against realism here is "enjoy". I'm sorry – enjoy your life? I'm not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error. But not necessarily an innocent one. Not necessarily a piece of fluffy pretending that does no harm. The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being "worried" by us believers and our hellfire preaching. Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What's so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Well, in the first place, that it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing. Given that human life isn't and can't be made up of enjoyment, it is in effect accepting a picture of human life in which those pieces of living where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are visible. If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income. And you'd think the same thing if you got your information exclusively from the atheist bus, with the minor difference, in this case, that the man from the Gold Blend couple has a tiny wrinkle of concern on his handsome forehead, caused by the troublesome thought of God's possible existence: a wrinkle about to be removed by one magic application of Reason™.

-From "The Trouble with Atheists: A defense of Faith" by Francis Spufford

[vintageanchorbooks]

The Two Raymond Chandler Sentences That Changed Walter Mosley’s Life…

More here.

[ajshinythings]

“Every happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet,” wrote Chekhov, “to remind him, by his constant tapping, that not everyone is happy, and that, sooner or later, life will show him its claws.”

-A Chekhov quote in the new preface to George Saunders' CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

[ajshinythings]

[ajshinythings]

The boundaries of our country, sir? Why sir, on the north we are bounded by the Aurora Borealis, on the east we are bounded by the rising sun, on the south we are bounded by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the we by the Day of Judgement.

-From The American Joe Miller's Jest Book