First off, a new installment in the Mbird series on Avatar: The Last Airbender went up this last week.
https://mbird.com/2020/10/avatar-and-the-motherly-love-of-god/
Not entirely sure the Jungian take on Katara as mother convinces me. I love the show and own all three seasons but Katara, as voiced by Mae Whitman, had a nurturing side but was capable of being vindictive, envious, and harbored an outright hatred of the Fire Nation. In other words, she was vehemently and passionately racist as a member of the southern Water Tribe against any and all Fire Nation people. In fact her hatred of the Fire Nation for taking her mother pretty much is "the" defining trait she has over and above her nurturing capacities. She's a fantastically written and voiced character (as all the primary female characters in the series were) but maternal? I feel like that might be reading Legend of Korra timeline elements back onto ATLA. If anything Legend of Korra made it seem that Aang and Katara (spoiler alert) were kind of terrible parents.
From the Get Religion wing, a few pieces of interest.
Evangelical publications have risked stomping on toes in covering allegations of misconduct on the part of Ravi Zacharias.
If you don't already know about that this isn't the place to get you up to speed. Whether it's the late Ravi Zacharias; John Howard Yoder; or even Thomas Merton (who has since been described as having a 19 year old lover who got married and, well, the theory that Merton was murdered has been entertained as well as a more recent idea that he committed suicide when his young lady lover left him) Christians across the spectrum keep finding out that our saints not only have feet of clay but that, to be as harsh as possible about this point, the lure and seduction of celebrity ruins the Christian witness of a celebrity whether a public apologist or a Mennonite theorist regarding violence or the hermit who never quite was a hermit. Does it mean we find no value in their ideas? Well, no, I wouldn't say that, but in an era as balkanized as ours it does get me thinking about how if James warned "not many of you should be teachers" a supplemental statement to that might be "and none of you should aspire to celebrity". A Fred Rogers can become famous by happenstance of what he did but that's not the same thing.
Terry Mattingly has written about how Rust Belt Catholics tipped 2016 in Trump's favor even if the conventional wisdom among journalists has often been on the evangelical vote--Mattingly has gone over numbers in the past to point out that African American votes and evangelical votes in some ways cancelled each other out and that HRC's loss in the Rust Belt came from Catholic voters, which is why it could be important for Biden to court Catholic votes.
But there are, let's not forget, the Nones, who are not necessarily atheist in their refusal to affiliate with a formal religion. It's not just that Trump may or may not keep Rust Belt Catholics, whether or not the Nones are large enough of a group to swing elections is something we may get to find out this year. Mattingly has recently written about the Nones as a factor in 2020.
John Ahern has some older pieces that delve into the contrast between music and drunkenness in the Pauline epistles. That the contrast is between "do not get drunk" and "make music in your hearts to the Lord" is clear enough on the surface, but Ahern argues that the Pauline instruction probably relies upon Pythagorean and neo-Platonic conceptions of the social role of music. Why mention that? Because I've advertised my disagreement with the conventional wisdom of Ted Gioia about a number of music history points here at the blog, however much I enjoy reading him as a stylist. Gioia's pejorative take on Pythagorean thought about music is something I might have to finally write about later, having finally finished Augustine's De Musica and also read Kyle Gann's wonderful The Arithmetic of Listening.
But let's get back to Ahern, who points out that Pythagorean ideals about music held that the right kind of music could soothe the drunken lout and the wrong kind of music could whip people into a frenzy so it was important to be careful what kind of music you played for people.
https://theopolisinstitute.com/music-and-drunkenness-part-1/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/music-and-drunkenness-part-2/
To put it bluntly, if Pythagoreans thought the right kind of music could have healing effects Gioia's dualism of Pythagorean/science/math/Greek/Western/The Man bad and shaman/healer/mystic/rebel good turns out to be a ridiculous assertion. I don't just so happen to be reading some books from the Society of Biblical Literature on divination and prophecy as political speech in ancient near eastern empires and the short of it, for now, is that ecstatic trance-based divination was considered okay but not nearly as reliable as astronomical/astrological research based divination in non-Israelite contexts. Within Israelite contexts, Esther Hamori has a fascinating piece I read earlier this year about how women were prophets but none of them are described as mothers. If Gioia had wanted to run with some idea that the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian tension between female prophecy and motherhood had some role to play, great, that's actually a topic of recent scholarly literature ... but as Karl Hagstrom Miller put it in Segregating Sound, Gioia is a capable writer who is working with the abandoned paradigms about folklore and ethnomusicology, to keep things brief. I might have to finally finish something about that wherein I propose that Gioia is the jazz pianist who "has to laugh" at the revisionist scholarship of guitarists like Elijah Wald who are not taking the jazz mainstream's self-understanding about itself or even about blues as a nascent commercial style. But that's stuff for later.
In other blogging news, I finished Ephraim Radner's A Profound Ignorance ... and it is magnificent! But I won't write about that now. I only finished the book last night.
2 comments:
Years ago in the UK a reasonably prominent minister and author left his wife - eventually settling down with another man. The publisher pulled all his books and remaindered a bunch - I happen to have a few that for whatever reason went out with a warning label on them.
Of course there were probably contractual clauses, and perhaps the author didn't want his books to remain on the market (though he doesn't seem to have lost his faith in the years since), but it struck me that there was an element of Docetism about the whole thing (separately this episode also led to one outrider of the Reformed movement taking on a hardline stance on discipling).
So I'm willing to deal with a little vice paying tribute to virtue, on the other hand it's harder to argue when there is an experiential edge to a particular celebrities thoughts - where they are essentially arguing that because they did X go then and do likewise (so yeah, Merton falls foul to an extent and Peterson being the current acme of this; perhaps he shouldn't have been handing out advice before he cleaned his room).
to attempt to translate your comment a little, chris e, I think there's a difference between people failing to live up to ideals they espouse or don't reject in public on the one hand, and double-standardized testing people work by through which what would be an outright "sin" for everyone else becomes a "mistake" for them.
That John Lennon could sing "Give Peace a Chance" doesn't directly contradict his history of being a domestic abuser because, contra some axioms, the personal isn't always political. So I don't think that proof that MLK Jr was a plagiarist in his early work means we should sweep all of his work aside as having no value.
On the other hand, when Sherman Alexie talked about how his mom raised him to respect women and it turned out Alexie had, by many accounts, acted like the same kind of entitled literary bro as plenty of white guy middle-aged literary bros out there THAT punctured the bubble of whatever virtue Alexie held forth as having. Paul could write "imitate me as I imitate Christ" and still concede through Romans 7 he still found himself doing things he didn't want to do, whatever that was.
That stuff with Jordan Peterson was just kinda weird.
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