links for the weekend: Ethan Hein on songs covered by Norah Jones and The Allman Brothers; Norman Lebrecht on the day the symphony died; Anglican high and low liturgy and why that matters with art snobs; Brad East on providence as a doctrine of consolation and Matt Jantzen on the same as doctrine of racial entitlement and theologians against that paradigm; Alastair Roberts on providence and ambition; riffs on Leviathan; and Jim West will be happy to know there are new books on Emil Brunner this year

We haven’t had a links for the weekend in a while and there’s some catching up to do.

Whose Beauty will Save the World? Doubts about Rod Dreher and other bids by Christians to "re-enchant" the world through the liberal arts. Romanticism 3.0 is probably not what we actually need.

https://www.bradeast.org/blog/my-latest-a-review-of-rod-dreher-in-ct

https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/10/make-christianity-spooky-again-rod-dreher-living-wonder-review/

…

There are three major elements to Living in Wonder: a metanarrative of decline; an overarching diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription; and a set of practices for the individual reader. I began above with the third, so now I will focus on the first two.

Dreher argues that the contemporary West is disenchanted. This term can mean many things, but Dreher defines it as “the evaporation of a sense of the supernatural within the world, and its replacement with a belief, sometimes unacknowledged, that this world is all there is.” A disenchanted society is materialistic, rationalistic, individualistic, and hedonistic. It is unspooky. It is not open to the transcendent, the divine, the mysterious, the inexplicable. It is closed off by design.

How did we get here? By a lengthy series of social, cultural, economic, scientific, and intellectual transitions, beginning in the late Middle Ages. We lost a sense of “the givenness of things,” to use Marilynne Robinson’s phrase. We began to think things are what we make of them rather than gifts from God to be cherished and stewarded. We strapped nature to a chair and tortured her for secrets. Alluding to Yuval Noah Harari, Dreher writes that “the story of modernity is of humankind exchanging meaning for power.”

We got power, all right. But was the exchange worth it? Dreher suggests not. In fact, he says, the tradeoffs are so drastic that, while we can’t go back, we can’t stay where we are, either.

…

 

The rise of technocratic utilitarian reason wielded to develop comprehensive mastery over nature and society, by chance?  Where, oh where, have I heard that thesis before?  Maybe Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had some book about kinda sorta suggested that since the age of Enlightenment instrumental reason and technological application outstripped other aspects of civilization in some book  called Dialectic of Enlightenment?

 

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

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

Alan Jacobs has been interacting with Brad East on culture, how to define it, and how Christians should or should not define "culture" and in what ways they do or do not (or can or cannot, by implication) "engage" whatever culture(s) might be:

https://mereorthodoxy.com/once-more-church-and-culture/

https://blog.ayjay.org/christianity-and/

https://www.bradeast.org/blog/defining-culture

Jacobs recently came back to this set of topics, thus why I'm mentioning this, however tersely via links I mention this.  Jacobs tries out a thought experiment that goes as follows:

https://blog.ayjay.org/the-culture-question-revisited/

So let’s try this. When some hunter-gatherers try to frighten off would-be predators, that’s not yet culture. But when they designate certain persons in the group to be their protectors, and find some means — clothing, decoration, modes of address, increased shares of food — to acknowledge the distinctive social role of the protectors, then they’re making culture. This is why James Davison Hunter speaks of “‘spheres of symbolic activity,’ that is, areas of human endeavor where symbols are created and adapted to human needs.” 

I think I can go one better than that because my dad was a member of a Native American tribe that was nomadic hunter-gatherer for untold generations--when hunter-gatherers don't bother to cultivate agriculture because there's no point in cultivating plant-life when you know all the edible flora in the region that's not yet culture ... or is it?  The knowledge of what plants you can safely eat that render moot wasting time on "cultivating agriculture" when you can put all your culture's cognitive bandwidth into hunting and fishing and making sure you get your necessary protein constitutes two different forms of culture. 

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520206168/aboriginal-slavery-on-the-northwest-coast-of-north-america

Leland Donald has a whole book on the slavery practices of aboriginal tribes in the Pacific Northwest coast of the North American continent that opens early on with a dry observation that when Western European and Anglo-American scholars encountered the tribes in the Pacific Northwest these tribes' very existence and customs threw giant monkey wrenches into generations of established Eurocentric bromides.  First of all nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes were supposed to be egalitarian and not have deeply entrenched slavery practices.  Second of all they had strong class/caste systems but not necessarily what Westerners would think of as "political office".  More surprising for local traders who had gotten accustomed to, let's put this in the bluntest way possible, screwing over the American Indians by trading beads and trinkets for animal skins and so on, was the local white traders discovered that the tribes around here were unusually shrewd and had what we'd have to call highly developed concepts of property, even intellectual property.  A song was yours and not someone else's, often because the guardian spirit you got (if you got one) gave you that song. In other words, the Pacific Northwest tribes had plenty of culture but it was not necessarily always in the form Western meta-cultural theorists recognized as culture.

Now let's get to the point where Jacobs writes this:

But hang on — aren’t we approaching politics here? Isn’t the creation of a group or class of protectors-of-the-community a political act? Indeed it is. So we need to decide whether when we’re articulating a theology of culture we need to include political theology as a component of it. Do we want to do that? Maybe, maybe not. We could

1. envision a theological anthropology that contains a theology of culture that in turn contains a political theology. Russian dolls. Or we could
2. envision a theological anthropology that contains a theology of culture and a conceptually distinct political theology. 

Jacobs prefers the former to the latter.  Maybe it's because I'm slowly pecking away at John Neville Figgis and David Nicholls; because I (like Jacobs) have read Jacques Ellul but also a bit of Edmund Burke; and maybe it's also because my dad was Native American from a PNW tribe I lean toward 2. It makes more sense to me to have a theological anthropology that contains a theology of culture and a conceptually distinct political theology because, oh, let me just broad-stroke this and point out that we're one year away from Native Americans having been given the right of citizenship.  All kinds of cultures have existed without formal political theologies, a point that I would hope both Alan Jacobs and Brad East can appreciate. 

So where Alan Jacobs attempted to go was to highlight that "culture" and "politics" intersect but don't necessarily overlap at all points, he has a point.  Alexandra Harmon has a book called Indians in the Making that sketches out a history of how fuzzy and in-process Pacific Northwestern tribal norms, customs and social definitions have been in the last few centuries I started but set aside due to mountains of other reading I've been doing. 

Socially conservative white Christian guys are probably "not" going to explore what Alan Jacobs describes as "demons" in culture.  Mainline Protestants? Oh, sure. Walter Wink seems to have synthesized ideas latent in Hendrik Berkhof and G. B. Caird or William Stringfellow across the last half century.  Roger Scruton sniped that Marxists have one of the most developed demonologies of the 20th century (meant, of course, as a put-down because good English conservatives are supposed to be "loyally indifferent" about Christendom but ardent in their opposition to Marxism).  By contrast, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones contended in the mid-20th century that too many British citizens surmised that they were default Christians because they were against communism without considering that Christian charity means you share Christ with the communist but that the capitalist is also absolutely a sinner in the eyes of God. 

I have a more practical and mundane complaint, the kinds of white Christian scholars in the West who swim in meta-cultural speculation are just doing that, they aren't really producing a culture as producing material about culture. This probably most pronounced within evangelicalism, which keeps proving Mark Noll was unfortunately right in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. One of the reasons I am skeptical about "political theology" as a buzzword in Christian academic writing is not because I don't care about those things but because that's seemingly all evangelical scholarship cares about.  Abstruse pontification about theories of sovereignty that will so obviously never get implemented in the real world and only manage to inspire stuff like writers at Current Affairs getting terrified of "natural law" is not the same thing as solving an actual cultural problem.  

I can't help but notice that the cultural battle lines drawn up about pop and classical music in academic settings bracket out along lines of race, class, political theories, and economic theories and yet the entire Cold War came and went with neither side accomplishing much by way of music-making. What we got instead were things like Socialist Realism which found music useful to the extent that it affirmed the triumph of global socialism on paper but reduced to Russian nationalism in practice (and as soon as Stalin died Polish intellectuals were rushing to affirm jazz was a thing to be supported). What we got instead were American government bureaus deciding that to show we're not like the commies we'll bankroll black musicians to tour the world and show the superiority of the American and Western way of life.  Conservatives embraced Germanophile, Francophile or Anglophile or Russophile art mysticisms and Christians, to the extent that they dealt with theological aesthetics conceded that they basically hadn't bothered.  

Frank Burch Brown has noted in his books that the supreme irony of Christendom is that its greatest cultural achievements in the arts, architecture, music and poetry all came about with practically zero theorizing about visual art, architecture, music and poetry in a form that would have anything to do with what scholars from the 18th century onward would call "aesthetics".  In other words, Christians who are historians of the arts and aesthetics have run into this irony that the greatest flourishing of Christian arts seemed to happen when Christian scholars weren't the least bit interested in aesthetics (because that whole concept had not been invented yet) or necessarily in what contemporary Christian academics consider "culture".  

Christian scholars talking about culture can be sort of like the guy who talks about writing a trilogy of epic fantasy novels but who never actually writes them because he's busy talking about them and what they're supposed to mean as cultural monuments.  That's counting a farm's worth of chickens when there aren't even any eggs laid. Write the books, see if they can even get published, then see whether they have any legacy.  Christian pundits have for generations frontloaded the intended legacy into conversation irrespective of actually making anything that might end up having a legacy.  Christian academics seem to assume that given enough metacultural speculation and theorizing the culture will just take care of itself or that their theories will catalyze triumphant cultural production. Sure, and the socialist realists in the Zhdanov era thought that, too.  Metacultural speculations are interesting in their time and place (sometimes) but they are not cultural production.  

some links for the weekend hidden in a weekend ramble about Alan Jacobs' thoughts on a piece by Brad East at Mere Orthodoxy

https://mereorthodoxy.com/once-more-church-and-culture/

Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority. Christendom traces its beginnings to the fourth century after Christ; it began to ebb, in fits and starts, sometime during the transition from the late middle ages to the early modern period. It is tempting to plot its demise with the American and French revolutions, though in truth it outlasted both in many places. It came to a more or less definitive end with the world wars (in Europe) and the Cold War (in America). Even those who lament Christendom’s passing and hope for its reestablishment have no doubt that the West is post-Christian in this sense. The West will always carry within it its Christian past — whether as a living wellspring, a lingering shadow, a haunting ghost, or an exorcised demon — but it is indisputable that whatever the West has become, it is not what it once was. Christendom is no more.

 

To ask about the church’s place in society while living in Christendom is redundant. The question answers itself. The question is genuinely new, however, when posed after Christendom. For that reason it has been posed continually in the past few centuries, especially in the last 75 years. H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, published in 1951, is a reliable touchstone. The postwar period up to the present has seen American Protestants in particular eager, and sometimes anxious, to clarify, to solidify, and, if necessary, to resituate their relationship to the nation: its legal and political operations, its respectable professions, its educational institutions, its means of cultural production. The conversation is no closer to being resolved today than when Niebuhr first gave the lectures in Austin, Texas, that would later become his book.  …

 

Alan Jacobs saw that article and had a relatively pithy reply.  The title of his piece is “Christianity and … ?” For the TL:DR era, Jacobs points out that for all Brad East’s erudition his post begs the question of what culture actually is, which is not something that earlier writers and philosophers, particularly Johann Gottfried Herder, took as given.  A sampler:

 

https://blog.ayjay.org/christianity-and/

This essay by Brad East is very smart, and takes the Christianity-and-culture conversation usefully beyond H. Richard Niebuhr’s categories. But I have one big question: What is “culture”?

 

Almost everyone who writes on this subject treats it as unproblematic, yet it is anything but. In the late 18th century Herder wrote of Cultur (the German spelling would only later become Kultur): “Nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods.”

 

I suspect that (a) when most people use the term they have only the haziest sense of what they mean by it, and (b) no two writers on this subject are likely to have a substantially similar understanding of it.

…

Brad’s essay, for all its virtues, suffers from its reluctance to dismiss the eminently dismissable Niebuhr. He doesn’t straightforwardly say what he means by “culture,“ but he begins his essay thus: “Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority.” This suggests that culture is something distinct from the other items in the list, but if culture does not include “society, … law, art, family, politics, and worship” I’m not sure what’s left over for it to be.

…

 

Now the invocation of Herder interests me because I’ve been reading Richard Taruskin’s last book and have also been reading a recent translation of Herder’s writings about music.