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Elsewhere

Should anyone still be here: this blog is (long since!) defunct, but I’m doing more or less the same thing on my own turf; put that in your RSS readers or follow me on Twitter if you’d like to keep watch. I’m outta here, tho.

To understand worship as a royal waste of time is good for us because that frees us to enter into the poverty of Christ. We worship a triune God who chose to rescue the world he created by means of the way of humility. God sent his Son into the world to empty himself in the obedience of a slave, humbling himself to suffer throughout his entire life and to die the worst of deaths on our behalf. He did not come to be 'solving the world's problems in any sense that the world could understand.' Worship of such a God immerses us in such a way of life, empowered by a Spirit who does not equip us with means of power or control, accomplishment or success, but with the ability and humility to waste time in love of the neighbor.

Marva Dawn, A Royal “Waste” of Time

It is taken for granted that the way to achieve certain important collective goods, like tolerance and mutual respect, lies in a code of behavior, like the 'speech codes' which some campuses have put in place. The contours of disrespect are codified, so that they can be forbidden, and if necessary sanctioned. Thus will our society march forward." "The 'code fetishism,' or nomolatry, of modern liberal society is potentially very damaging. It tends to forget the background which makes sense of any code, the variety of goods which the rules and norms are meant to realize, and it tends to make us insensitive, even blind, to the vertical dimension. It also encourages a 'one size fits all' approach: a rule is a rule. One might even say that modern nomolatry dumbs us down, morally and spiritually.

Charles Taylor

applytowhimberlysplease-blog

Alum of the Year

Congratulations to this year’s Whimberly’s Distinguished Alumnus (Alum? Alumni? we never know) of the Year, Elvern Beadle (House Morze ‘07). Elvern was chosen for this award due to his distinguished career as an entrepreneur in London’s most reputable magical alley. Elvern’s most notable success has been creating a unique spell that allows him to hold over 1,000 name-brand watches in the interior flap of a normal overcoat.

Elvern will be honored with his award at this year’s opening banquet—that is, if we can locate him. If any other Whimberly’s alumnae have information about Elvern’s whereabouts, please, get in touch!

The Distinguished Alumnii Award includes the title of Magae Doctoriis Causum, granting the recipient the necessary credentials to teach their subject of expertise at Whimberly’s. Which is handy, since our Professor of Magical Objects just died unexpectedly. So again, please, somebody tell our new Distinguished Alumnum Doctor Elvern to give us a call.

Why are so many Christian writers and readers drawn to sentimentality? Why is it that if one googles the phrase “Christian poetry” one has to wade through pages of results with titles like “Grandma’s Praying Hands” and “Childhood Smiles” before getting to Dante, George Herbert, and Paul Mariani? I suspect it has to do with a misguided interpretation of Philippians 4:8, which says, “Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are honest, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” This verse is often evoked in admonition to avoid the garbage of popular entertainment, and rightly so. It is, also, alas, taken to mean that we should model our mental and emotional lives on those three monkeys who hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. Forgetting the direction toward honesty, many Christians seem to believe that what Scripture means by “pure” and by “lovely” is merely the pleasant and the naive, the Hallmark Channel, not the reality of a world in need of redemption.

The Sentimentality Trap

High standards need strong sources. This is because there is something morally corrupting, even dangerous, in sustaining the demand simply on the feeling of undischarged obligation, on guilt, or its obverse, self-satisfaction.

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. *COUGH*modernconservativemovement*COUGH*.

It is a characteristic of all things now called 'efficient,' which means mechanical and calculated, that if they go wrong at all they go entirely wrong. There is no power of retrieving a defeat, as in simpler and more living organisms. A strong gun can conquer a strong elephant, but a wounded elephant can easily conquer a broken gun. Thus the Prussian monarchy in the eighteenth century, or now, can make a strong army merely by making the men afraid. But it does it with the permanent possibility that the men may some day be more afraid of their enemies than of their officers. Thus the drainage in our cities so long as it is quite solid means a general safety, but if there is one leak it means concentrated poison—an explosion of deathly germs like dynamite, a spirit of stink. Thus, indeed, all that excellent machinery which is the swiftest thing on earth in saving human labor is also the slowest thing on earth in resisting human interference. It may be easier to get chocolate for nothing out of a shopkeeper than out an automatic machine. But if you did manage to steal the chocolate, the automatic machine would be much less likely to run after you.

G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross

Whoever does not come to know the face of God in contemplation will not recognize it in action, even when it reveals itself to him in the face of the oppressed and humiliated.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, as quoted by James K.A. Smith.

thingsmagazine

Kim Boske

If we cannot imagine [Marilynne] Robinson being invited to preach at a big-box Bible church somewhere in suburbia, that may say less about her than about the anti-intellectual and artistically indifferent culture of much of today’s evangelicalism; but then, those developments may have been exacerbated by Christian intellectuals’ neglect of their responsibilities to the life of their churches. At some point in the past sixty years or so a perverse and destructive feedback loop engaged, and I cannot see how to disengage it. Still, it is noteworthy how consistently inward and solitary the faith of the characters in Robinson’s novels is, including that of her most compelling creation, the elderly pastor John Ames in Gilead. The community of church is not a strong element in these people’s lives; they tend not to speak for anyone or anything more than themselves, and the conversations that they have about faith are mostly internal. I can’t help wishing that someone, someone of Marilynne Robinson’s stature and gifts, would tell readers of The New York Review of Books that such church communities need not be scorned or feared, and then tell those church communities the same about the readers of The New York Review of Books. That would require a patience, a kindness, a courage that it seems scarcely possible to ask for in our current climate.

Seriously this essay is so good

When we read the great Christian intellectuals of even the recent past we notice how rarely they distance themselves from ordinary believers, even though they could not have helped knowing that many of those people were ignorant or ungenerous or both. They seem to have accepted affiliation with such unpleasant people as a price one had to pay for Christian belonging.

Alan Jacobs

Though the key Christian intellectuals of the day and their fellow travelers — Mannheim and Adler, Eliot and Oldham, W. H. Auden, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dorothy Sayers, and many others — did not oppose their social order, they were far more critical than their predecessors had been during World War I. The Christian intellectuals of World War II found their society shaking at its foundations. They were deeply concerned that even if the Allies won, it would be because of technological and economic, not moral and spiritual, superiority; and if technocrats were deemed responsible for winning the war, then those technocrats would control the postwar world. (It is hard to deny that those Christian intellectuals were, on this point at least, truly prophetic.)

Alan Jacobs. Contrast this with the high moral purpose we commonly imbue depictions of WWII with today.

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Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test. Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! this our fathers did for us.’

The Seven Lamps of Architecture, by John Ruskin.. I am deep into Ruskin at the moment, so fair warning: there could be a good many quotations from him in the coming days. (via ayjay)

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The Seven Lamps of Architecture, by John Ruskin.. I am deep into Ruskin at the moment, so fair warning: there could be a good many quotations from him in the coming days. (via ayjay)

Oh yeah.

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John Ruskin’s house, Brantwood.

There is a sanctity in a good man’s house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins: and I believe that good men would generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and honorably, they would be grieved at the close of them to think that the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to sympathise in all their honor, their gladness, or their suffering,—that this, with all the record it bare of them, and all of material things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp of themselves upon—was to be swept away, as soon as there was room made for them in the grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, no affection felt for it, no good to be drawn from it by their children; that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm monument in the heart and house to them; that all that they ever treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted them were dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man would fear this; and that, far more, a good son, a noble descendant, would fear doing it to his father’s house. I say that if men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples—temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers’ honor, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.

— Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture

ayjay-deactivated20161206

It would be amusing to watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come upon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: ‘I ought to wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs…. But not being Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on … let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocated ankles.’ What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion which appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one — that Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises…. Their letters may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. They write to each other in a language of their own, an almost exasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consisting of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always used in speaking of Browning, ‘So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett have gone off together. I hope they understand each other—nobody else would.’ It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a marriage.

G. K. Chesterton, Robert Browning (via ayjay)

I really want to know what Browning is talking about.

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on the move

A friend has a theory about Cracker Barrels. There can’t possibly be that many, so immaculately alike, Room-of-Requirement-esque in their ability to appear at the precise moment of need for sustenance on long stretches of green and gray nothing, providing exactly what every American didn’t know they were craving until they step in the door—butter and biscuits—anyway, I’ll stop here, because point made, this is impossible. The far more likely scenario is that these are all portals to the one true Cracker Barrel. We pull off the highway and drop slightly off the space-time continuum. We are fed, and then we go back on the road.

It is the kind of theory you come up with in expansive countries like ours. I have been reading Emily St. John Mandel, a Canadian author who lives in New York and writes mostly about winding journeys across the United States (never let them tell you road narratives are male territory). Her characters are desperate as often as drifting, motivated sometimes by crime thriller, sometimes by dystopia, usually by fear, occasionally by addiction to running. She conjures Stillspell, New Mexico with the false everytown conviction of a Cracker Barrel. North Americans can write like this because North America lives in my imagination not so much as a united continent but as a series of movements. I don’t think of New York, Chicago, Montréal, Austin, Medicine Hat, Sacramento. I think of the highway. And I don’t even drive.

That road culture’s in me all the same. You know this. I loved giving foreign names at cafés in Catalonia, the ambiguity of worn-in jerseys and faded hoodies in England, the colorful life stories I invented for taxi drivers in Argentina, the phenomenal anonymity of New York. I think sometimes I might like the trains better than the places they take me. Or perhaps I just like the excuse to read.

One of Mandel’s protagonists, Lilia from Last Night in Montréal, has a compulsive need to travel. She starts out the book needing to run away from someone, but even after she’s lost them, she keeps going. It’s more than a habit. It’s her particular cowardice. At one point, she confesses that the cities have all started to look the same to her. There was a time when I would have found this ludicrous. Blending implies forgetting. The industrial roasted Pacific Northwest is not the dirty glamorous Río de la Plata is not the brilliant colonial DMV.

Yet I find myself mapping every city I’ve ever known onto the others. Wherever I am, I see where I’ve been. It may be that my memories are stretching, purposeful, in constant search of narrative, a thing I crave like Lilia craves flight. It may be. But I’m partial to the Cracker Barrel theory about my life.

My sister and I stopped in a café in Seattle on our long walk up a hill I can’t remember. It was more of a cultural center. Wifi and workspace to the left, café to the right, gathering space on the patio in the back, art gallery off to the side. Conversation everywhere but I don’t really recall people talking much. The place had a hum. And it looked exactly like a café I once spent an afternoon in on Avenida del Libertador, across from the fine arts museum in Buenos Aires, the new-school energy of September, back before I got used to café con leche. I am not saying it reminded me of this place. I am saying it was this place. I do not know which memory has trumped the other when I picture it in my mind’s eye.

I quote Cortázar:

Y mientras alguien como siempre explica alguna cosa, yo no sé por qué estoy en el café, en todos los cafés, en el Elephant & Castle, en el Dupont Barbès, en el Sacher, en el Pedrocchi, en el Gijón, en el Greco, en el Café de la Paix, en el Café Mozart, en el Florian, en el Capoulade, en Les Deux Magots, en el bar que saca las sillas a la plaza del Colleone, en el café Dante a cincuenta metros de la tumba de los Escalígeros y la cara como quemada por las lágrimas de Santa María Egipcíaca en un sarcófago rosa, en el café frente a la Giudecca, con ancianas marquesas empobrecidas que beben un té minucioso y alargado con falsos embajadores polvorientos, en el Jandilla, en el Floccos, en el Cluny, en el Richmond de Suipacha, en El Olmo, en la Closerie des Lilas, en el Stéphane (que está en la rue Mallarmé), en el Tokio (que está en Chivilcoy), en el café Au Chien qui Fume, en el Opern Café, en el Dôme, en el Café du Vieux Port, en los cafés de cualquier lado…

I know why I am in todos los cafés. So does Cortázar, if not his protagonist. He once wrote a story called “El otro cielo” in which his characters travel between nineteenth-century Paris and twentieth-century Buenos Aires by way of the covered passages or arcades (Guëmes and Vivienne). People call Buenos Aires “the Paris of South America” for its useless Mansard roofs, or rather, the glitz they convey. Cortázar lived that urban fraternity and rendered it literal. He walked into one passage and came out the other. Everything was doubled but not separate enough to be clearly so. It’s not so strange a concept. That is in fact how vision works.

I am in Barcelona when it’s summer and in London when it rains and in New York when it snows and in Argentina when it blooms and in Virginia when it swelters. I am in Barcelona when I dream and in London when I explore and in New York when I achieve and in Argentina when I love and in Virginia when I write. I am in many more places, many times of day. I have only the one life.

Tomorrow is my last day in my hometown. That’s an impossible and unnecessary sense of finality, I know. I’ll always visit. I’ll always be from here. This is my country. But hometowns are incubators for my generation, at least in cities like mine where the rent is rising. We know they are not ours. This is the benefit of being from an old place; it is impossible to get illusions about ownership rather than stewardship.

I expected to feel a lot more than I do. It’s always like this. A lot of nerves, a bit of quiet dread, but no epic sadness. (Yet.) I’ve taken Alexandria with me all over God’s green earth and I do not expect it to be any harder to take it with me an hour south. I am always here. I always have been.

giftsoutright

Beautifully written. Maybe it’s that I’m not much of a traveler, or maybe it’s that I have lived in pretty “new” places in general, but rather than being “always here” when I’m away from my home place I only feel the lack of it. I experience each place I live much more as a singular entity, with a flavor and texture utterly distinct from everywhere else I have been.

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