links for the weekend: Ethan Hein on AABA form; Rick Beato asks why bands don't chart anymore; Richard Bratby writes on Mozart's God and Molly Worthen reviews a new biography on J Gresham Machen at First Things

It's been a while since I've done a links for the weekend post.  Here we go.

more on the back and forth between Alan Jacobs and Brad East, why I find it easier to take the former more seriously than the latter

https://blog.ayjay.org/one-more-enchanted-evening/

 

Alan Jacobs has had a back and forth with Brad East in the last week or so about enchantment vs. disenchantment.  I am hardly in a place to insist but I do think that for as much Jacques Ellul as Alan Jacobs has read I hope he read Matthew T Prior’s book Confronting Technology: The Theology of Jacques Ellul. For anyone who isn’t already committed to eventually getting through eighty books on exorcism, diabology, exousiology, spiritual warfare, the reception history of the Enoch literature and Genesis 6 references to The Watchers, Prior’s book distinguishes exousiology (a theology of powers and principalities a la Walter Wink) from demonology (I better not have to explain that topic here at Wenatchee The Hatchet of all places!) whether of the Merrill Unger variety or some other) in Christian thought. 

 

Alan Jacobs is interested in playing with an upgraded demonology a la Jacques Ellul’s The New Demons?  Alright.  A new variation on powers and principalities?  Okay!  Robert Ewusie Moses’ Practices of Power: Revisiting the Principalities and Powers in the Pauline Letters should be on Jacobs’ reading list (if he can carve out time for it).  I would suggest that the book builds upon what strikes me now as a skeletal idea in James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power about Christ overcoming powers and principalities with a specific eye toward white supremacism as one of those powers.  Given the history of white Euro-American Christians regarding BIPOC folks as either having demons, being demons or being subjected to demons I trust Alan Jacobs has at least some inkling of the delicacy involved in rehabilitating demonology as an element of Christian discourse.  I don’t for a second reject the proposal since I’m a professing Christian and digging into the reception history of demonologies and how they developed in the Second Temple period as nascent Judaism grappled with serial imperial occupation was something I was hoping to do grad work in.  But I didn’t manage to do that.  Instead I just tried to keep up with a smattering of books written on those topics.  I haven’t pulled that off but there’s a big old reading list you can peruse if you like.

 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/01/updated-version-of-reading-list-from.html

 

So if Alan Jacobs really wants to explore the way Christians and Jews have written about demonology in the last two and a half centuries … I got a recommended reading list.  I am openly sympathetic to the idea that Christians in the United States can and should regard racial supremacist dogmas as demonic but that’s not really what I intended to get at in this post.  No, I’m thinking more broadly about the years I’ve spent reading Alan Jacobs and Brad East and how, lately, I tend to lean more Jacobs than East.  Why?

 

I recall a rambling piece that was published at one point in Mere Orthodoxy which is currently available at East’s blog.  The title is so routine among theological metacultural punditry I don’t even need to quote it since it’s right there in the html but …

 

https://www.bradeast.org/blog/2019/07/against-pop-culture.html

Against pop culture

Jul 3, 2019

Christians love pop culture these days. But the subset of Christians who love pop culture the most is pastors, writers, and academics. Pop culture as a mode of "engagement"; pop culture as a means of "reaching" this or that group; pop culture as a way of "relating" to students: all these and more are celebrated and commended and practiced in churches, classrooms, and websites every day. "Finding the gospel in [pop culture artifact X]" is a ubiquitous and representative genre. Christians love pop culture, and Christians with an audience want fellow Christians to love pop culture.

Why is that? Why should Christians like, love, or "engage with" pop culture?

I don't think there are very many, or perhaps any, good answers to that question.

…

 

So … then there’s this year’s peroration from the same Brad East on how the Jedi in Star Wars are like Catholics and the wizards in Harry Potter are Protestants.

 

https://www.bradeast.org/blog/catholic-jedi-protestant-wizards

Catholic Jedi, Protestant Wizards

Aug 12, 2024

A recent visit to Orlando brought home to me how different the respective aesthetic visions of Star Wars and Harry Potter are. A thesis came to me: Jedi are Catholic and Wizards are Protestant.

 

What was that about there not being many or any good answers to the question about why Christians should like, love, or “engage” with pop culture? I wouldn’t say Alan Jacobs is exactly a poptimist but he’s not anti-poptimist in rhetoric or method.  East has soap-boxed against Christians being poptimists while then, a few years later, turning around and doing pretty much the kind of thing you’d think he wouldn’t think is a great idea.  Now I’ve made no secret here at Wenatchee The Hatchet I love animation and comics and anime and manga.  I’ve written tens of thousands of words about Batman: the animated series.  I’ve had over the years comparing thoughts with Ethan Hein about songs by Stevie Wonder and David Bowie and John Lee Hooker among other things.  I even recently wrote a piece called “Cross Over Instead” suggesting that if, in the last few centuries, mainstream classical music has never taken the guitar seriously maybe classical guitarists should take that as a hint that we will never be welcome in mainstream classical music and reach out to every kind of guitarist playing every kind of music so that, should classical music as “civilization” die the miserable death its would-be defenders claim it’s constantly in danger of, we guitarists will not suffer much loss for that. 

 

If I wanted to I could probably write 20,000 words about manga by Rumiko Takahashi.  I’m not sure if I will but I  sure could.  So I’m probably firmly in the poptimist category of criticism even if I have written extensively on how Beethoven shifted his developmental episodes into the transitions of the first movement of his final piano sonata; and on the first half of Nikita Koshkin’s formidable and rewarding 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar; and more recently I’ve begun a slow-going and I hope thorough analysis of the solo guitar sonatas of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka. I haven’t touched that project since February 2024 and Grand Sonata II is a very big piece with a lot going on it, both in terms of how much Matiegka appropriates and transforms themes by Haydn and what he does across his three-movement work.  Which is to say that I can toggle back and forth between classical guitar and cartoons and manga fairly comfortably.  If Brad East is worried that kids these days are too glued to their screens I am just not sure I share that worry because in my experience, to be blunt, old people glued to their screens and imbibing paranoid conspiracy theories are not coming off as much better off than people scrolling through TikTok videos watching the antics of their favorite influencers. 

 

When Jacobs writes: 

… Can you bind the strong man? I can’t. Which makes it strange to me how small a part Jesus plays in the current discourse about enchantment, even among people who claim to be Christians.  …

I’d say that Emil Brunner’s quip about liberal Protestantism eliminating the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as mediator was the whole point of The Mediator.  Germanophile highbrow art asceticism or lowbrow trance-seeking mysticism, the old Pythagorean and Orphic impulses, may have been cultivated and assimilated in Christian patristics but we live in the days of Ted Gioia where this dualism has to be held up as irreconcilable and insoluble as if faith traditions haven’t spent millennia demonstrating and arguing otherwise.  When I read Philip Ewell and John McWhorter (both black atheists) differing on questions about classical music, I enjoyed reading both of them for the insights they have and grumbling at the insights they most assuredly do not have, which they might have picked up if they were willing to dust off some books by James Cone. 

 

Christians can contribute to aesthetic debates within contemporary culture as good-faith contributors whether or not Christendom exists.  Jacobs has read his Jacques Ellul so he knows there have been Christians in the last century who have taken this approach.  My soap box in the last ten years at Wenatchee The Hatchet has included a concern that if Christians want to be taken seriously it would behoove us to explore potential theoretical and practical solutions to issues and problems that people who are not the least bit Christian would actually want solved.  In my case, as a classical guitarist and hobbyist composer who loves Thelonious Monk and Haydn in comparable measures, the various highbrow/lowbrow and white/black dualisms entrenched in musicology and history are things that I believe need to be overcome.  I agree with Philip Ewell on that basic issue even if he would not agree with me about maybe much of anything else, least of all Christian dogmatics.

 

I hope I can say I’ve staked out a consistent and coherent position about taking “high” and “low” equally seriously.  I don’t want to say that insipid music is made by insipid people and it isn’t worth taking seriously because, well, too many Christian cultural pundits forget that Romans 12:16 is still in the New Testament no matter how much they inveigh against pop culture.  Do you know people who like Taylor Swift songs?  Be willing to hang out with them.  I find Katy Perry annoying myself but I don’t have to make an issue of that if I’m hanging out with someone who likes to listen to her.  I’m sure there are plenty of people who would be baffled as to why Oshii’s Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dream is one of my favorite movies, and who’d want to read my case for why, if there’s a Maison Ikkoku anime remake it should be 1) more faithful to the source material and 2) Saori Hayami would rock as Kyoko Otonashi.   And I could still turn around and write more about cross-referencing Aquinas’ discussion of intra-Trinitarian forms of relationship with John of Damascus’ discourse on perichoresis as a way to recalibrate conceptions of musical time as they’ve been presented by Adorno, Zuckerkandl, Rochberg, Scruton, Yust and others.

 

I get that for polemicists who want to polemic there need to be dualisms but all too often the dualisms seem too convenient and sometimes I even suspect they get wielded in bad faith. 

It was the back and forth of Alan Jacobs and Brad East that spurred me to write 

metacultural speculation is not cultural production, some thoughts on reading exchanges between Brad East and Alan Jacobs on culture

Ayano Kamei performs "Prikazki" (2020) by Atanas Ourkouzounov

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozjNeqwpvxE

Atanas Ourkouzounov has primarily written music on and for the guitar, whether solo or chamber music, so it's very fun to hear he has explored his musical language in a piece for piano. There's a read-along score with this video.  As I've enjoyed Ourkouzounov's music for about two decades now it's fun to share that he's composed a piece for piano, which I hope you enjoy. 

Internet Archive loses recent court case

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/libraries/2024/09/09/internet-archives-court-loss-leaves-higher-ed-gray-area

Longtime readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet may already know I have made prodigious use of Internet Archive via The Wayback Machine.  During the period from 2012 through 2014 it was a useful resource for finding earlier forms of links from the former Mars Hill Church.  For months at a time I found that I would document something meticulously that Mark Driscoll said in sermons or published statements in Mars Hill sites and discover that a week later, sometimes as soon as a day or so later, the material had gone the way of Joker's pencil in The Dark Knight.  It's ... it's gone!

So there was a running tag of robots.txt to document when robots.txt was used by Mars Hill to block access to statements made by Driscoll and other Mars Hill staff by means of The Wayback Machine.  In a small way the website was a precious resource in Wenatchee The Hatchet's efforts to chronicle and preserve statements made by Mars Hill about itself at a time when PR and other leaders seemed to be purging incriminating or troublesome content for whatever reason.  My friend Steve Hays at Triablogue went so far as to comment that what turned out to be true was the best way to make Driscoll look bad was to just quote him accurate and in context and the man made himself look bad all on his own.  It began to seem, too, that this was pervasive enough that Team Driscoll at Mars Hill could functionally "tell" Matthew Paul Turner to listen to Driscoll's 2008 spiritual warfare series at one point but then purge the whole resource so you couldn't even listen to it as controversy flared up in 2014 over ResultSource and the plagiarism scandal of late 2013 continued, among other things.

The book lending program of 2020 is neither here nor there for that part of the history of this blog but it can be easy to underestimate the cultural significance of the resource(s) Internet Archive has made available if you only look at one ruling.  

Alan Jacobs has doubts about bids at re-enchantment, what exactly do people want the world to be (re)enchanted with?

https://blog.ayjay.org/some-enchanted-evening/

September 8, 2024

some enchanted evening

 

It seems that “enchantment” is having a moment right now — e.g. — and, well, okay, but I’d like to make two points: 

1.       Experiencing the world as enchanted has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that at the end of history every knee will bow and every tongue confess this. That is to say, Christians who have boarded the Enchantment Train should realize that what it promises is often (if not always) something quite different than what the Christian faith — which is often disenchanting — promises, and demands. 

2.       A related point: As I wrote a decade ago, “The porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The ‘showings’ manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only.” 

You want to live in an enchanted cosmos? Cool. But be careful what you wish for. You might get it. 

Is the cosmos enchanted? Is it disenchanted? Is it standing on one leg and singing “When Father Painted the Parlor”? (Tom Stoppard reference there.) It’s not something I’m inclined to think about much, because for me — YMMV, and it really and truly may vary, you may be aided enormously by such reflections — it’s just another way to avoid thinking about Jesus. I already have a thousand of those, I don’t need a thousand-and-one. 

…

So Jacobs is not on board with the re-enchantment train.  I can’t say that I am, either, and I’ve still got an roughly eighty book reading list surveying Christian thought on powers, principalities, unclean spirits, exorcism, and spiritual warfare.  One of the fun paradoxes of playing with an idea that racial supremacist canards about music could be informed by principalities and powers is that it’s not a remotely new idea.  Not only would I not take credit for the idea, I could say the idea is implicit in James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, although I think far better explications of what the powers and principalities can be thought of as being have been written not by Cone in his famous book but by Esther Acolatse, Robert Ewusie Moses, Daniel K Darko, and Albert Kabiro wa Gatumu.   

 

Alan Jacobs may not be as into literally academic study of evolving Christian and Jewish concepts of demonology as I am but I take his point that merely pining for re-enchanting the world doesn’t address the question of what that world is going to be enchanted with.

 

Since Jacobs alluded to David Bentley Hart’s latest I am reminded of Emil Brunner’s old book The Mediator where he contended (at some length) that the general impulse in liberal Protestantism as it emerged in German theology (and elsewhere) was ultimately a rejection of Christ as Mediator.  All other dogmatic and doctrinal concerns such as rejecting penal substitutionary atonement, expiation and propitiation understandings of the Cross as “barbaric” were subordinate to the actual final goal, which was to reject the exclusivity of Christ.  Reject “that”, Brunner contended, and you have rejected being a professing Christian altogether.  All the art mysticism Europe could churn out in the wake of Friedrich Schleiermacher or Rudolf Otto was not going to change that basic move.

 

Attempting to expand art mysticism and art asceticism to a more global swath could eliminate the Eurocentrist impulse, perhaps, but not the elitist impulse. Anglicans such as David Brown and Gavin Hopps can argue that John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme can be regarded as equally expressing a desire for universal human fellowship as Beethoven put into his Ninth Symphony.  But in Pauline terms that would amount to the altar to the unknown god, natural religion and natural theology only get so far.  In the case of both Coltrane and Beethoven it’s still the cognoscenti who are enlightened and not the ordinary people who might balk at Beethoven’s bloviating length or not follow Coltrane’s harmonic and melodic idiom.  That’s not a knock against either Coltrane or Beethoven, by the way, I’m just pointing out that enchantment projects in the liberal arts advocated by academics tend to have a strong gnostic/mystery cult aspect to them.  That’s the element Alan Jacobs didn’t discuss but it’s not a count against his basic point. He has written elsewhere about highbrows worrying about the activities of levelers, and leveling may be its own kind of disenchantment project.