You'll have noticed by now that 2012 was a busy year for Wenatchee The Hatchet. In 2011 a total of 381 posts went up. In 2012 the number has been 706 (not counting this one). So that makes for a year of higher productivity in sheer words and that's not even counting guest posts written for Internet Monk or Mockingbird. We were nearly writing ourselves into cramps this year.
About what? That may be the most rhetorical question that could have been posted on this blog this year. You probably know what, things connected to Mars Hill, which is annoying but understandably inevitable. I was more proud of the blog posts nobody seemed to read about Ferdinand Rebay's chamber music than about Martian stuff. I mean, sure, I did what I could with those posts, too, but this blog seemed to get pigeon-holed by a lot of people as a blog for the "other side", to go by a stray comment or two.
And, yes, this blog has dealt with things related to the history and development of Mars Hill. As a former member who actually, believe it or not, still gets along well enough with people who are still there it could be remarkably easy to read this blog as some kind of "anti" blog, which is certainly what some have wanted it to be (or have not wanted it to be but convinced themselves surely was). For folks who labor under that illusion go read that blog post on sonata form in the works of Sor, Giuliani and Diabell, or maybe go read that blog post about conflicting foundations for identity in Brad Bird's film Ratatouille. Or maybe you could read the blog post about Batman as the ideal 1% and the significance of that in American popular mythology. In other words, the stuff people come here looking for most is not necessarily indicative of what goes on at the blog.
But what has gone on at the blog has included debunking repeated and spurious claims that Mark Driscoll talked about Ted and Gayle Haggard's marriage. He didn't, he merely used the occasion of that encounter with the gay hooker and meth on Ted's part to pontificate on a bunch of issues and to "take one for the team". It was confounding in the extreme what "taking one for the team" about pastors who were exasperated by their sex lives with their wives ... until this year when Real Marriage came out. Then what was inexplicable to Wenatchee The Hatchet for years became depressingly explicable and retroactively cast a shadow on a decade of preaching and teaching. Driscoll wrote of Grace's single dalliance that had he known about it he would not have married (apparently never mind that God commanded him to marry her at that point); by analogy, there were surely more folks than WtH who could say "If I'd known this was what the Driscoll marriage was really like during roughly a decade of the church's history I would have had doubts about his qualifications to be a pastor." Driscoll used to say that if you had a marriage on the rocks it would be better to quit being a pastor to fix your marriage.
Or you could fix your marriage after years of secretly having problems in it and then write a best-selling book about that. Far be it from me to be sad if the Driscolls fixed their marriage, I could even express some happiness on behalf of Benny Hinn and his wife fixing their marriage even though I still think Hinn's doctrine is terrible and that he's basically a con artist. On that note, a marriage healed may be a good thing but a healed marriage is not in itself an indication that a person is fit to be a pastor or teacher.
Although given the way Driscoll shook hands (inevitably) with T. D. Jakes early in 2012 it confirmed some skepticism I expressed the previous year. Driscoll had no problem eviscerating William Young's fictional work The Shack and shook hands with Jakes, piously blogging about the lessons learned about winning people and not arguments weeks after pre-emptively assasinating the character of Justin Brierley over issues such as women in ministry and holding to more than one approach to justification than penal substitutionary atonement. Jakes was a mentor to Paula White and Driscoll didn't seem to have any problem with that at any point. For that matter Driscoll's own earlier preaching in Christ on the Cross had him espousing multiple approaches to the atonement. Eventually in 2012 the Driscolls would convey the idea that Grace was Mark's functional pastor, making Driscoll's quip to Brierley on the subject of "except who's in charge" one of those strange acmes of double standards that seem, unfortunately, to be more characteristic than unusual in Driscoll's public approach.
But double standards seemed to work themselves out at the cultural level within Mars Hill, too, and few cases were more symptomatic of this than how the disciplinary situation with Andrew was approached. Andrew's disciplinary case was esscalated to a point where something was posted on The City (which Mars Hill's PR person Justin Dean said was due to "unclear communication"). Someone who had access to The City conveyed the escalation letter to Andrew and Andrew, in turn, contacted Matthew Paul Turner. Mars Hill members would go on to say that the only reason it was widely known was because Andrew went to bloggers and the press.
Well, no, Andrew only knew of it because it got posted to The City due to "unclear communication" and was given the document after he'd left the church and stopped being a member. It almost goes without saying he was no longer dating a pastor's daughter (or stepdaughter, a detail that virtually no bloggers or journalists seemed to pay any attention to even though that not-so-mundane detail and the campus location made it all but certain one could identify several of the parties by name based just on that single piece of information). To be fair, it would be all but impossible for people who have never been in the church culture or observed it for a good span of its history to be able to work out the names of parties involved over a single weekend.
Or in the case of another former member who shared a story anonymously, it might take as few as thirty seconds reading four sentences to make a probable identification. There were simply not that many high-profile divorces within the Mars Hill community in 2005 involving founding members of the Mars Hill group in which a woman married a musician and had two kids. No, don't attempt to name names here. I've deleted comments that have attempted to finger specific people.
One of the disconcerting things about Mars Hill's public response, whether attempting to "clarify" or issue "a call for reconciliation" is their double-standardized approach. For instance, people might anonymously suggest Andrew was a duplicitous man-whore without so much as expressing any thought about whether his girlfriend might have lied about any thing at any point. What if she did? What if she had a history of lying about her sexual history to bolster her reputation? How would any of us know? Even the description of the presumably now very-ex-girlfriend as a fiancee is not entirely certain. If there's something about the Mars Hill culture can't possibly be expected to know it's that all sorts of things were able to be interpreted as being further along the path to marriage or romantic interest than might actually be the case. This is not to say everyone was leading everyone on but that Mars Hill was the sort of place where you'd read posts on the Midrash about engagements having never heard of so-and-so dating so-and-so before.
It was not impossible for Andrew and his girlfriend at the time to have simply been dating but presumed engaged. "If" that were the case then perhaps this could explain why some people considered Andrew to be deceptive when the nature of the deception lay not in what a guy said or didn't say but in tacit or explicit expectations imposed on the situation from the outside. To allude to Baumeister and others on this topic, we are more apt to lead ourselves on through our desires than others are to lead us on about the real nature of their intentions. But I digress. All that was to say that Mars Hill advocates were very swift to assume the worst about Andrew in a situation where, fornication being what it was, it seemed highly improbable that Andrew alone would have been the wolf.
While Andrew's confession and subsequent disciplinary escalationw as taking place in late 2011 James Noriega had stopped being listed as a pastor in any capacity, despite a meteoric rise within Mars Hill since 2006 and co-leading Redemption Groups. Noriega just vanished from the Mars Hill scene in terms of leadership. The odds that Noriega is still at Mars Hill now are zero. Men who rose to the role of pastor within Mars Hill who got fired or deposed or relegated to lower ranks from their previous place rarely stay for long. Some of them may stick around but that might be more a point of keeping in touch with the legacy anticipated than the social role of the present. So Noriega vanished from the leadership scene shortly before Andrew's case picked up steam in disciplinary terms.
Had the Mars Hill PR machine not stumblingly "clarified" that they had released two staff for "overstepping spiritual authority" (whatever that means) then Wenatchee The Hatchet would not have remembered that Noriega vanished from the leadership roster at around the point the MH PR statement said staff were let go for overstepping spiritual authority. So thank MH PR, you did a great job of clarifying things in a way that required a reclarification that let Wenatchee The Hatchet work out who one of the fired staff probably was. With PR like that who would need access to The City? Andrew didn't even have access to The City and somehow against all odds got notified of the escalation of discipline. The entire case that Noriega was no longer employed by Mars Hill was one Wenatchee made inferentially by simply keeping tabs on the Mars Hill media scene.
That included some blogs and blog posts that were linked to in late February this year that vanished by March 2012. For some reason, possibly just a church-wide reboot of the websites, all personal information and archives about Mars Hill pastors, their spouses and children (or stepchildren) got expunged from Mars Hill's online media. The likely reason was pretty simple, anything possible to prevent the identification of the parties involved was worth trying. Given the way church counsel and discipline worked it was probable that Andrew ended up talking to someone like Phil Smidt, who was biblical living pastor around Ballard. Mike Wilkerson's role was too high up in oversight and Noriega was no longer a pastor at that point, making Smidt at least a possibility for the one who talked to Andrew. But we can't be sure, we can only propose that a process of elimination regarding who held what roles at what campus at the time provides a narrow field of choices.
Some people on blogs just named names, or at least named Andrew. They were not quite so willing to name the others. That hardly mattered because in a culture like Mars Hill, which seems almost addicted to the use of social media as a way to expand the brand, the identities of many parties had been floating around in the internet for quite some time. Most people would not know what to look for or bother to look if they did, which is fine. It's not the goal of Wenatchee The Hatchet to name any of those people, just to remind Mars Hill advocates that "privacy" isn't privacy when it's been blogged and tweeted and Facebooked and news covered away. Mars Hill has been a culture that reserves the right to say lots of stuff but has not fully grasped the significance of what "on record" mixed with "broadcast media" really entails.
When the call for reconciliation happened it was basically, ultimately, impossible to believe. It read more like an attempt to get fewer people to go on record with their stories. No offense meant to KOMO but their coverage was not going to inspire confidence even if dozens of people agreed to talk and my guess is most people were simply not willing to talk. For TV coverage who could blame them?
The KOMO story was too bad, and they may have had to work with what they had, which was not enough sources to build much of a story on. Some of us prefer working in print form and it has been in print that the most detailed coverage of events has happened. The Stranger, its animosity toward Mars Hill a given, did a pretty decent job covering the Andrew situation. They even got on record statements from Pastor Jeff Bettger, which Mars Hill's PR in its anonymous boilerplate somehow overlooked, claiming that only Slate attempted to contac thtem. So besides inadvertantly tipping off Wenatchee The Hatchet that James Noriega had probably been fired Martian PR also bungled factual accuracy regarding who outside Mars Hill reached out to Mars Hill and who inside Mars Hill had made any response. Mars Hill PR seemed to be more consistently apt to spread misinformation than Andrew's story which, again, was startling in its level of detail. Not even some obviouf obfuscation on Matthew Paul Turner's part kept us from identifying a few names.
But Matthew Paul Turner's blog was arguably the exception that proved the rule with bloggers, many of whom had already made up their minds about Mars Hill based on what they already thought about Mark Driscoll. It's to Turner's credit that he wrote about Mars Hill as a culture and not merely a cult of personality (which I think most normal people would probably agree it is, too). As the Andrew case unfolded it began to seem to me, at least, that the Mars Hill faith in the power of social media and its capacity to control and guide its media presence and social media system was gravely misguided. There are things that Mars Hill folks posted to Twitter that can't be unseen. You probably know who you are and wish I hadn't seen what you tweeted if you're reading this and you've been in leadership at Mars Hill. Sorry, `twas your tweets not mine. Having an actual private life often entails not using broadcast media.
Anyway, in the wake of Andrew's case and Lance's case making headlines clarifications were issued, a call for reconciliation was issued, and basically nothing happened that got much coverage. Wenatchee knows of a few people who did go to meetings but the arc of the meetings was often a campus pastor or Dave Bruskas in some cases basically hedging on whether it was even likely that leadership at Mars Hill could have said or done things to raise doubts about essential qualification. Agree to disagree and avoid conceding much seemed to be the general report. Whether anything internal to Mars Hill was conveyed beyond a possible "people are hardhearted and over that we feel more sorrow than anger" would be hard to know.
But in mid-June it turned out a bunch of layoffs happened across Mars Hill. Driscoll explained that this was not because anybody sinned but because Mars Hill had been pursuing an economic model that was not viable for the long-term future. Mull that one over, folks. If this were a family or a single person who was running systemic deficits over revenue what would a Mars Hill response likely be? Repent of bad financial stewardship? In late 2011, in fact, the annual report and accompanying DVD God's Work, Our Witness basically ended with the case that Mars Hill could do better with giving. Go to Are Women Human? for at least one overview of the DVD. Whether or not AWH had a chance to review any letters or the annual report associated with the DVD isn't clear to me but the blog posts are a good reference point for folks who want some context for the 2011 giving request.
So in late 2011 Driscoll made the case that the people of Mars Hill needed to give more and/or more sacrificially. In mid-2012 Driscoll was conceding systemic deficits at every single campus and that the financial model the leaders had committed to was not viable for the long-term future. Which leaders? Well, uh the executive elders would seem to have been the ones who'd been doing that. Which executive elders? Mark Driscoll, Dave Bruskas and, at least in 2011, Jamie Munson (who stepped down in September and got a remarkably fond send-off from Driscoll talking about how above reproach Munson was). But when Sutton Turner was introduced he was introduced as someone with kingly gifts Mars Hill had been badly needing for some time. What about Munson's kingly gifts? Didn't he scout out the 50th street real estate purchase according to Driscoll himself in Confessions of a Reformation Rev? Wasn't Munson's leadership so paramount that questioning it or being perceived as questioning it was one of the principle charges in having a couple of pastors fired as employees and removed from eldership? We'll get to that later.
For now the observation is that for a guy who was touted as always above reproach Munson's articulation of the idea that a church should seek to be growing even when it's not a good idea could be construed as a "too big to fail" approach to church growth that wasn't so far off from banking problems. The opposite of growth in a church is not necessarily the death that Munson asserts rather than defines, because sometimes in a non-profit a period of growth isn't as important as cultivating the donor base you have. That Mars Hill had a loyal and centralized donor base at one point prior to multisite would "seem" to have been settled but multi-site meant many very loyal and long-time members went out to campuses while Ballard ended up laying people off about every 18 months. But the looming problem of Mars Hill growing even when it wasn't a good idea was going to hit a crisis point at some point and that crisis point was, apparently, some time in 2012. Just as the Andrew situation getting to a point where Andrew went to a blogger and the story went to the press was depressing but not surprising, neither was the admission of Mark Driscoll that Mars Hill's top brass had embraced an economic model that was not viable for its long-term future. That, too, was something Wenatchee The Hatchet privately warned could become a significant problem or should at least have been a concern.
Now to be sure Mars Hill may have applied the brakes under Turner's leadership and the collateralized debt of Mars Hill may have dropped from it's 19 million number and, in any case, Mars Hill's real estate investments don't seem near the trouble MacDonald got for his church as discussed on The Elephant's Debt. Whether or not MacDonald's gambling and the debt he seems to have gotten his church into will have any impact on his being Mark Driscoll's latest "good friend" remains to be seen. After a few years a person might be forgiven for thinking that in the Driscollian lexicon "good friend" means "has a book I can promote at the book table".
As books go Real Marriage made a best-seller list and brought Wendy and Andy Alsup over at Practical Theology for Women . That some newlyweds have genuinely benefited from the book I take as beyond dispute. That the book was depressing reading for any former Mars Hill member is something I've also found to be generally true. That Andrew's disciplinary case involved a guy who was fornicating with a pastor's daughter while the Driscoll's book discussed how the founder of Mars Hill (now that the co-founderes have been scrubbed away from the story) was fornicating with a pastor's daughter. Curious and probably of no real significance other than coincidence.
But the book prompted the Alsups to publicly review the book and add some context that had not been made available before. It's a testament to how incendiary that review could have been that Wendy had comments closed at post publication, something she virtually never does. Trust me, I've been reading and loving her blog for enough years that I know whereof I speak! She normally encourages participation and discussion but it was prudent for her and Andy to put their thoughts in print in a way that did not include comments.
Bent Meyer made a public statement that he was one of the two fired pastors from 2007 in late January. In mid-March Paul and Jonna Petry went on record with Joyful Exiles. Regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet will be aware of the prodigious use to which Petry's documentation has been put to blogging here. The documentation is instructive both to Mars Hill defenders and Mars Hill critics. Mars Hill defenders will likely defend the firings to this day and will probably do so on the basis of an argument that goes roughly like this, "I know person X and he's a good guy and he voted that Bent and Paul were guilty therefore I stand by that decision being the right one even if it wasn't perfect." Critics will take essentially an opposite view.
What was not discussed in any fashion at all by the blogs that deigned to discuss Joyful Exiles was the actual bureaucratic procedure itself. The assumption was that Mark Driscoll fired Meyer and Petry and the rest was mere formality. The formality was arguably far more important than bloggers seemed to realize. Can someone produce a formal statement, email, or document that establishes that Mark Driscoll did the firing? Even when Driscoll was recorded in audio saying that two guys had been fired for the first time in the history of Mars Hill. Now it can sure sound as if when Driscoll says "we fired ... " that it's some kind of royal "we". A person may conclude that the 2007 audio represents Driscoll from years ago and that Driscoll's totally repentant now. Now if Driscoll were repentant of anything there would be some indication of it, and by indication that would mean saying anything at all, particularly anything to the effect that how and why the firings were undertaken was improper. Nothing of the kind has been said that I'm aware of. In fact it would appear that no pastors in any capacity have acknowledged either that Joyful Exiles exists or that there is anything broken in the relationships that were fractured in 2007. When Driscoll gave Munson a loving send-off from being the lead pastor (which meant Driscoll became president under the Munson-drafted by-laws and Sutton Turner's replacing Munson constituted replacing what became the Secretary's role, so to speak) Driscoll made a point of saying that Munson was above reproach and always had been.
So Munson was above reproach in formulating the charges upon which Meyer and Petry were considered unfit for ministry. Some of those charges included nepotism in the case of Meyer. But what were Munson's qualifications to be a pastor, let alone the lead pastor of Mars Hill? Was his experience in the corporate world prior to Mars Hill actually all that significant? When did he actually preach such as a pastor would be expected to do? If he had kingly gifts did those involve scouting the 50th street real estate that was eventually purchased and found to not be useable as a church facility because the zoning was for industrial use? And was Munson above reproach in being the lead pastor who formulated the charges that became the basis for putting Meyer and Petry on trial and simultaneously appointing Scott Thomas head of the Elder Investigative Taskforce?
About that task force, what evidence was presented at the trial? What evidence did Scott Thomas collect and why did Scott Thomas tell a member of Mars Hill that a "conciliatory process" had been completed days before he and the EIT would make a case that Meyer and Petry ought to be fired? Why was a member of the EIT, Dave Kraft, not even at the trial and able to vote in absentia? In what trial would an absentia guilty vote seem to be a legitimate option?
Now people might appeal to the fact that the guilty vote was unanimous. The sticky wicket there is that there's enough research about crowd conformity, cognitive biases, and boardroom manipulation techniques in, say, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast & Slow, that we can establish that even a fully unbiased group will conform to steering methods such as a vote by show of hands rather than secret ballot. So it would appear that in addition to claiming that a conciliatory process had been completed for two men who were about to be removed from eldership on the basis of a swift investigation of some fashion (the evidence for which should be able to be produced at any time) it would appear that the very nature of the vote was a methodology well-suited to steering what may have been an already biased jury.
Might someone fairly wonder if the entire process was nothing more than a kangaroo court at best and that in any other procedural setting that the methods employed could be considered jury-poisoning? If as a comment at Wartburg recently alleges Dave Kraft voted in absentia what made him so sure of the guilty of Petry and Meyer that he somehow mailed in or phoned in the guilty vote? From a procedural standpoint should the elders who were on the investigative task force even have been given the ability to vote on the matter? For that matter did the lead pastor who made the accusations vote "guilty" or did the lead pastor abstain? Not that Mars Hill would be interested in answering any of these questions, it seems, but they seem to be relevant questions raised by the documents and correspondence at Joyful Exiles.
But if Mars Hill and its advocates are not interested in considering those issues neither were Mars Hill critics in 2012 particularly interested in even looking at the substantial role Scott Thomas played in the trial and virtually no one could have known about the gap between what Thomas said had just been completed and what was about to occur in late 2007. So far as critics of Mars Hill were concerned it had to be all Driscoll. Guys like Munson or Thomas didn't matter even if they were essential cogs in the procedural machine that ejected Meyer and Petry from eldership. If Driscoll were considered to be the unquestioned authority then what the documents and correspondence at Joyful Exiles would illustrate is that however centralized the authority may have been the responsibility for the decisions made at the top were so utterly diffused to the entire leadership culture and Driscoll's committment to the use of a royal "we" so steady that the likelihood of actually getting the firings back to Driscoll himself was remote.
It may be impossible to overstate the significance of this situation--when authority is heavily centralized into a coterie of top-level leaders while responsibility for controversial or unpopular decisions are diffused to every level of the leadership set (whether in fact or in name only) then decisions can be defended as having been made unanimously across the entire culture even when the decision may have originated in two or three or even a single person in the uppermost echelons of leadership. At that point we would be discussing a process in which a person might fairly wonder whether the whole point of the process could have included plausible deniability at multiple levels across a leadership culture for a decision that originated with just one or two guys.
Now some might say at this point that the roughly 24-26 elders who voted to fire Meyer and Petry may still be at Mars Hill but are effectively neutered. Fair enough but I would propose that the moment of being neutered had to have significantly if briefly predated the 2007 firing for every man in that room to have raised his hand for a guilty vote. This is not in contradiction to any of them sincerely believing there were grounds to remove Meyer or Petry from eldership. To be plugged in at any capacity into the leadership culture at Mars Hill is to have been plugged in by endorsing that mission whatever form it took. The nature of how the mission was implemented clearly changed and it may well be many men who voted in 2007 aren't paid staff now but the majority of men stayed and that they raised their hands may indicate that they weren't neutered in any capacity. They were, however, convinced for some reason to remove Meyer and Petry from eldership based on the charges formulated by lead pastor Jamie Munson who appointed Scott Thomas as head of the EIT.
And within a week of this being documented at Joyful Exiles Scott Thomas was relating to Matt Chandler that he felt "released from leading Acts 29". In mid-June around the time Driscoll was announcing that Mars Hill had been running systemic deficits across every campus Darrin Patrick apparently announced that Scott Thomas would be joining the team at The Journey. Scott Thomas had not particularly bothered to resign his membership at Mars Hill during this period but apparently even being a former executive pastor conferred, perhaps, some privileges? For those inclined to see the 2007 firing process as little more than a kangaroo court Scott Thomas would have had the most dirt on his hands and it was going to be imperative that he either fall on his sword like a good soldier or get cut loose or maybe just given an offer he couldn't refuse from some other church within the Acts 29 network or some other possibility.
What seemed unlikely to work out as a status quo was an Acts 29 board in which a 2/3 majority of the board members were Mars Hill executive elders pastor or present. Having Driscoll, Turner, Bruskas and Thomas on the Acts 29 Board; having 80% funding of A29 from Mars Hill; and having a great deal of the staff consisting of Mars Hill members meant that any distinction between Mars Hill and Acts 29 was starting to become a distinction without a difference. In April 2012 collosal changes happened in Acts 29 in leadership and location. By this time Mark Driscoll had met with James MacDonald and T. D. Jakes and shook hands with Jakes as a proper trinitarian weeks after pillorying Brierley in "A Blog Post for the Brits". Whatever work Driscoll did as a "professional journalist" he's yet to produce a by-line for a single non-editorial article he's written for a publication and if he's got a problem with bloggers the pot should be slightly more careful about calling so many kettles black. After all, there was that kerfuffle.
But when Driscoll announced "What's Next For Me" the casual reference to even renting the city of Ephesus for a day was a strange thing. Where was this money coming from to rent Ephesus for a day? When Driscoll would, months later, say that Mars Hill had embraced an economic model that was not viable for the long-term future did something like renting Ephesus have anything to do with that? A good deal of central expenses got cut, it seems, but a lot of campus jobs got cut or people dropped out. Executive pastors at campuses like Kyle Firstenberg, James Harleman, and Chad Toulouse disappeared. Toulouse was listed as one of the members of a committee to keep executive elders responsible. More and more of the committees, such as they were, began to include newer names or the reliable Munson. You can go hunt up the names if you like.
Amidst all these changes Driscoll never uttered a word about Scott Thomas. It was as though Scott Thomas didn't exist. There wasn't even any cryptic reference to how two men who were least administratively gifted for a task rose up and opposed some stuff. Of course one of the two men who got canned amidst opposing the 2007 by-laws helped draft the earlier by-laws. Whatever it was that made Munson more qualified than Petry to draft by-laws for a church was simply never explained at any point or to any degree. Because simple majoritys and not 100% agreement were prescribed in the old by-laws the very idea that two pastors in a group of 24-26 had to get fired has never once been explained.
There are some decisions that may seem needless that make sense. For instance, if you liked the earlier Raimi Spiderman movies you might ask why there'd be a remake? Because Sony didn't want to lose the rights to make Spiderman films and have those rights revert to Disney, that's why. You may not agree with that and that's fine but there's an actual explanation for that. It makes sense. The reasoning behind why two pastors had to get fired given what the pre-November 2007 by-laws said doesn't add up. If a guy like Driscoll has repented of anything he would have publicly repented of specific things instead of generalities. After all, he used to teach that your confession should be more specific than general at some point, didn't he? When pressed to explain himself or apologize he still seems more likely to blog about what the issue under a lot of issues must be rather than admit he said or did something mistaken. He regrets, he's said, that his bitterness at Grace led him to preach some chauvinistic things against women he regrets now. So what was that stuff? When did he repent of this because 2011's anatomically male effeminate woship leaders didn't look like a change from Driscoll circa 2006.
Meanwhile, Scott Thomas managed to get a job at The Journey without resigning his membership. how does Wenatchee The Hatchet know this? A little bird told me. This will get to a point that critics have not had much use for. You see in the real world Mars Hill members and even some folks within leadership have not had much trouble hanging out with Wenatchee The Hatchet. They know who the blogger is but it's no obstacle to friendship and it's no obstacle to Wenatchee The Hatchet to regard them with affection despite some disagreement. By now it would hardly need to be explained that Wenatchee's got some significant differences with a few things that have gone on at Mars Hill; what's more Wenatchee warned of a few things as potential bombs that could blow up in the faces of Mars Hill that pretty much all seemed to blow up this year. There is as yet no evidence that Mars Hill has reformed its approach to member discipline or set real limits on pastoral authority in member discipline. It has not established, as yet, an explication of the foundational competencies for its biblical living pastors (formerly known as counseling pastors).
While some moves have been made to ameliorate what is retroactively acknowledged as a fiscally dangerous approach to managing the church the retroactive significance of this has not, as such, been acknowledged. In other words there was confession and what fans will call repentance but the confession was half-hearted. This may be observed from the sad reality that if the bad steward of money was a family or a single person sin would get bandied about far more quickly than the never-mentioned possibility of sin in financial stewardship on the part of the leadership class. In other words Mars Hill may not have needed to do "epic" filming in Ephesus for The Seven or for any ramp-up for Who Do You Think You Are? but all that's just petty stuff compared to members not giving sacrificially enough so that new campuses can be set up, or so it seems.
There's a temptation for former members and critics that's easy to fall prey to this year, to assume the worst about the whole venture from jump. It was somehow always that bad. Really? Some of the people who are inclined to say this now were people who enjoined me to become a member of Mars Hill because if I didn't become a member, for real, then I was just being a "consumer". The thing is that it won't suffice to say that, oh, so-and-so just drank the kool-aid because anyone who's looked over social scientific research on conformity will recognize how very swiftly we can all conform given the right set of circumstances.
Rather than suggest the water in the well was always toxic we who were in there should recognize we, so to speak, put some of our poison in the well. We played a role great or small in assuming the worst about criticism and critics while choosing to overlook significant problems. How many hundreds of people heard some guy say that if he didn't have sex for a period of longer than three days he'd get wiggy? How many people read William Wallace II's screed known as "Pussified Nation" on the old unmoderated Midrash and cheered Wallace on when he was acting like an irresponsible reprehensible punk? If Driscoll had ever really repented of that whole mentality he would have confessed as much in Confessions of a Reformission Rev.
He didn't. He presented that phase of his life as his deciding to make guys man up rather than presenting it as a pseudonymous tirade about the nation being a nation of pussies who won't man up. I mean it's not like sorenchurchyard or Crusty or Eschato-Man or Feedback Seed or Laika or maybe even aold or Satin Cog/Saint Cog couldn't just opt to show up from the Midrash or Babblerash ether and mention a thing or two. Or maybe sean or Viper with Venom. Whether or not tetsuo would want to wade in is some other matter and I wouldn't blame tetsuo for not feeling like going back to that. ReformUrAss, I know you're out there and I hope you and the wife and kids are doing great. :) See, you'd have to be the oldest of old-school to know any of those usernames from the unmoderated Midrash. Having said that, there was plenty of fair warning way back in Pussified Nation that something was off and though I considered the whole WWII a sign of stupid hot-headedness and immaturity I convinced myself he'd get over that, grow up, and move on. Well, sometimes people don't change as much as we may hope they do and that includes me.
How many people from that old core, that foundational group, are still at Mars Hill? Mark and Grace are still there but what about the Gunns? What about the Mois? What about other people like the Schlemleins or Chris Comis? Skye? Heard he's Eastern Orthodox. The Rorabacks, no real need to rehearse what happened to them for folks who know that. As a commenter put it here at the blog of the original core that founded Mars Hill only three of that original core are still around. Let's remember that at that stage there were no Driscoll kids and that means that two of the three who are said to be the only remaining core of the original Mars Hill would have to be Mark and Grace Driscoll. Have a guess who the third one is and whoever that third one is must be resolved to stay in the proverbial marriage no matter what happens or how bad it gets even if a bunch of terrible mistakes were made.
The thing that people like to say about cults is how bad they are but the truth is that if it were only ever bad nobody could possibly get suckered into being in them. If Mars Hill is a cult it's a cult because the sense of community feels electric at first, the glory fades and the routine sets in but in your heart you still think it's gotta be whatever that was you felt years ago. Maybe ten years go by and you realize it's not that community anymore. You don't get to see your friends any longer because they're married and have kids or live too far away. You don't hang out until the late hours talking about anything and everything and sharing your lives together. You stop being in your 20s that feel full of unlimited possibilities and get into the 30s where the world and its opportunities seem to shrink around you.
Maybe you begin to discover that that marriage that seemed so exciting in your young dumb horny 20s has turned into the misery of your 30s. Maybe you discover you're stuck in one dead-end job after another. Maybe you discover your child has a learning disability that some Christians consider a sign of rebellion. Maybe you find out that your friends or that you yourself are willing to compromise for the sake of a legacy. Maybe you know that the legacy being forged is being forged by a person who's a jerk ... but you get to be part of that legacy and the person is, at any rate, not being a jerk to you. Ergo, whoever thinks he's a jerk and won't qualify it ... must have some kind of problem with spiritual authority. That's what you tell yourself right up to the point where you get both barrels in the face or someone close to you does.
Then the temptation is to view it as all bad. Suppose a guy gets the bad side from the culture. What does it matter than that the person has three of his or her children find wonderful spouses in that culture? Forget that, the whole thing is damnably evil and it was all about numbers? Was it? It wasn't just about numbers all the time. There was also that courtship fad? ;-) Most males willing to go along with the courtship fad were probably trying to get with a couple of attractive ladies and very, very little more. It was fascinating to watch a bunch of single guys go along in the hopes of getting sanctified matrimonial tail. Yours truly, almost notoriously, kept repeating that he found the whole charade idiotic and based neither on a plausible reading of biblical literature or on even a particularly honest appraisal of social conventions from the Mediterranean and other regions. It was just a stupid self-congratulatory fad drummed up by dads who had control issues and either lost track of who their daughters were already in love with or who wanted some magic bullet pre-emptive veto on boys their prepubescent daughters wouldn't even be thinking of dating yet. I didn't put it that strongly because I realized that would be a really jerky way of putting it. But that's what I thought.
In one of life's strange paradox I got along great with the women who were most sought out in that fad. While a lot of guys lamented "the friend zone" and "the other f-word" I got along well with a variety of lovely women. For a lot of beligerent horny unmarried males the friend zone may not be such a bad place for you, especially if all you can do is assess women as wife or not-wife possibilities. But in a setting like Mars Hill not being in a rush to be married could often play out as you being assigned a group guilt in the form of the "selfish single". You can only shake that off in so many ways. If you pay your bills on time, try to do right by family and friends, and manage to have money to spare to help friends with disabilities or in financial straits then that's what you can do but in a culture where Markulinity flourished the just not-being-married part could mean that the guy was not living up to his full potential.
It's easy for people who left Mars Hill on bad terms to completely poison the well even when they benefited from it in a variety of ways. Some of the bitterest people were more than happy to wield their social clout to bludgeon others' reputations and the thing is some of those people have gotten to a point where they can admit that they were fans of the Man. Maybe I was, too, even though I convinced myself that it was the three co-founding elders together that made the community what it once was. Those who would say now that it was "always" the Driscoll show weren't actually there early enough, or have re-remembered things in a way that doesn't fit what the people who were around at the start may still recall. Or maybe we were all suckered by something we didn't understand.
Informally I've noticed that there are people who turned away from formal churches and there are a lot of people who turned to more traditional churches. Maybe Mars Hill was a kind of spiritual junior-high or high school and some of us graduated? Or maybe, as I'm more inclined to put it, we found it exciting in our 20s to discover things that in our 30s and 40s we began to realize was nothing more than reinventing the wheel. Even as far back as 2002 when people asked me to describe Mars Hill I would say, "Basically TULIP Baptist." That was before Driscoll got chummy with John Piper but in retrospect it would seem to make some sense. It took me a few years to observe that my theological views simply didn't run TULIP Baptist as such and so I found a new place to be.
But the exigencies of life were such that I had no spouse to "pour myself into" (a possibly archaiv Martian phrase). I ended up in a position where I was stuck in almost every sense and as I was stuck the lives of my friends and family moved along sort of with me and sort of without me. I began to observe over the years that there were people who would say they'd "moved on". Well, I'm not convinced everyone does move on or that "move on" always means what people hope it means. Hey, I'm into Batman so this one won't shock you, there are things traumatic enough in your life that you can't just move on, the trauma or the experience (maybe even a good one) becomes an organic part of who you are and how you think. Watching a family fall apart before your eyes as a child may not be a formative experience for others but it was for me. It doesn't matter how good you tell yourself you are you, too, can somehow end up being immersed in the brokenness, become a part of the fracture, maybe without realizing it. Maybe some things break in a way where what is broken is broken as a gesture of self-defense that is perceived as malice and is forever after interpreted in that way. Perhaps you get sucked into the vortext of competing loyalties in which your decision is tacitly, if perhaps often internally, drags you into a bog in which you feel an irreducible, unresolvable double-bind and yet not making a decision is a disaster of its own.
I've been described as a friendly pessimist and by friendly pessimist that can mean I notice that everything and everyone must die. There were some great things I discovered at Mars Hill, people with whom I can recognize that while everything and everyone eventually dies it's okay to enjoy the beauty of life and friendship that we have together now. For reasons I don't quite understand I'm not sure I picked up on that as a realization until the time when I began to be at Mars Hill. As ugly as the shunning and related fiascoes seemed to be I was put in a position where I had a chance to decide whether I would choose to be a team player or choose to remain friends with people despite disagreement and despite some of those friends being kicked out of the house.
You see this is the thing that bugs me about blogs for and against, it's that they brook no ambivalence. Life is more compromised and ambivalent than we like to imagine in our selves that we fashion in social media ... isn't it? It's surprisingly easy for the self-described exiles to speak as though they weren't complicit in the things they now condemn and it's surprisingly easy for the insiders to essentially imagine that however dicey this or that may be that, ultimately, the legacy is worth sacrificing a few less-than-worthy participants in the legacy. This blog has been a sometime exercising in questioning both kinds of thought. What former insiders may not easily concede is that we invested in a legacy we're no longer sure was worth it. What outsiders may be unwilling or unable to grasp is that we can all fall prey to this kind of temptation that a legacy that seems bright and shining enough will inspire us to go along with something.
After all, despite pious bromides about movements and legacy, and this and that, what was the inspiration for building a tower in the plain of Shinar? Legacy. Legacy may be presented as one of the most pious of Christian impulses but on more careful examination it can be the impetus to create not a new Jerusalem but another Babylon. We're fools if we convince ourselves we can't fall prey to this temptation even as we would condemn those who we think are trying to build that tower of legacy. Some of us cooked more bricks and made more mortar for that tower, whatever it is, then we might be comfortable acknowledging. In my 20s I thought talk of legacy was great and in my late 30s I have come to believe that legacy may be the most single dangerous temptation any group of Christians can have. It is for the sake of legacy that piles of dead bodies are strewn outside the place of sacrifice.
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
Sunday, December 30, 2012
HT Internet Monk: Why C.S. Lewis didn't write for Christianity Today
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/saturday-ramblings-12-29-12
http://www.christianitytoday.
...
Before introducing the world to The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis published Miraclesin 1947. It was his last straightforward defense of the gospel. Lewis told his friend and biographer George Sayer that he would never again write another "book of that sort." And he didn't. From that point forward he published primarily fictional, devotional, and biographical material. His passion for explaining and defending the Christian faith could now best be found in a magical world of talking animals.
That's why when Carl Henry asked him to write articles on topics of Christian doctrine, he had to decline. As Lewis told Henry, "My thought and talent (such as they are) now flow in different, though I trust not less Christian, channels, and I do not think I am at all likely to write more directly theological pieces. The last work of that sort which I attempted had to be abandoned. If I am now good for anything it is for catching the reader unawares - thro' fiction and symbol. I have done what I could in the way of frontal attacks, but I now feel quite sure those days are over."
One of the things evangelicals seem to feel obliged to do is to see theological points in everything. Everything has to be justified by a theory of justification, so to speak. Americans in particular can want there to be some "redemption" in the stories they embrace. The idea that a story could be about someone who doesn't find "redemption" (like the protagonist in John Woo's The Killer, or King Saul within the biblical narrative) or even a character like Wickus in District 9 who stumbles upon redemption without accepting some invitation, and this even amidst his various ethical failings, is not what evangelicals seem interested in. We want our redemption straight, no chaser. We want the unmediate 200 proof propositional statement, preferably explicated in the past-tense so there's no doubt who the redeemed one is. We may say we affirm an Augustinian approach to sanctification in American evangelicalism but in pop culture we seem to have more of a, how do we put this, Keswickian approach to the sanctification of somone in his or her character arc.
We can pay lip service to the idea of vocation but for cultural artifacts we may know but we don't care that it's possible to do things as Christians that don't have to announce at every single step "This was made by a Christian." I spent a few years over at Mars Hill and while some folks can talk about going "upstream" where culture gets made it remains to be seen whether or not that infiltration project has worked out or that it even needs to be consciously undertaken by a group of people gathered together under 501(c)3 status for that to be accomplished. After all, if you just do your job you're not actually going to change the world unless your job happens to be changing the world.
Suppose, for the sake of making a polemical point, the essential difficulty of evangelicalism is we've wanted to do the direct propositional hour-plus sermon about things. The writerly axiom is that you show rather than tell and evangelicals want to tell, tell, tell all the time. A skilled writer knows there is a time to tell and certain roles within the life of faith do, in fact, involve telling things but there's also the showing part and that may be where we have a lot of people who only know how to tell and haven't managed the showing part. It is funny that even within the art of writing there is an axiom to show rather than tell. How do you tell in a way that shows and in the visual media how do you show in a way that tells? That many people opt not to bother with these questions does not mean the questions don't get answers.
If many of today's evangelicals had gotten what they wanted they'd have gotten a Lewis who wrote more variations on Mere Christianity and never wrote any fiction. How obvious is the doctrine of justification by faith alone in the narrative of Samuel-Kings? I'm not saying it isn't in there, I'm just pointing out that in the narrative literature even the Bible itself seems to completely fail the propositional statement approach to doctrine that many evangelicals have wanted for how Christians write about Christian belief.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Old Life: What New Calvinists can learn from Old Calvinists--Failure
http://oldlife.org/2012/12/what-new-calvinists-can-learn-from-old-calvinism-failure/
Collin Hansen lists the top-ten theology stories of the year. Number ten is the boom-and-bust cycle of Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin. Hansen goes on to wonder why Christians follow celebrities and don’t reflect on failure (possibly because the Gospel Coalition is built on fame and ignores the troubles of folks like C. J. Mahaney):
But to be something other than postmillenial is to be pessimillenial, right?
And in a sample flourish of why D. G. Hart is considered by some to be a "Grumpy Calvinist" ... :
http://www.opc.org/os.html?article_id=269&issue_id=67
... However we estimate the size, scope, and power of the modern nation-state, the reality is that Reformed Protestantism was on the ground floor of the construction of modern Europe and its colonial proliferation, a period that ran from 1600 at least to World War II. No wonder, then, that conservative Reformed believers pine for the days when their faith mattered to the mission of a particular nation. Scottish Presbyterians still long for the days of the National Covenant. Abraham Kuyper endeared himself to Reformed believers by evoking a golden age of Dutch history. Meanwhile, American Presbyterians have their own version of this nostalgia and attempt to construct a Christian founding of the United States even though the very point of the new nation was to bring an end to the pattern of confessionalization that had torn apart Europe (and especially England) during the seventeenth century.
Yet, the question remains whether Reformed Protestants were hoping to remake Europe or reform the church. Thanks to a host of Holy Roman Emperors, from Constantine and Charlemagne to Charles V, thinking about Europe apart from the church was impossible. Even so, the reforms that the original Protestants initiated were overwhelmingly ecclesial and bore directly on doctrine, liturgy, and church polity. Only because the church was part of the established political order did church reform translate into broader social and political developments. The Reformation was first and foremost a religious effort and only secondarily did it affect politics and culture.
The desire fo revival to bring about national transformation is so endemic to American spirituality that the idea that there are ways of being Christian that are not predicated on the tacit assumption that "real" Christianity will transform a society into something by process of a kind of spiritual social reverse-engineering process is often not on the table. Now, surely, if a Christian influence in society improves things that's nice ... but the Metro-Evangelicals sometimes seem to frame transformation of culture as having an importance that can take precedence over being salt and light in mundane ways. And after all has been said and done (as if) was the goal of reaching the culture for Jesus to really do this for Jesus, who by Christian belief already owns everything that exists anyway, or was it to, through the promulgation of Jesus as savior, reverse-engineer, if possible, the culture into something closer to what we were hoping to see?
This world may be passing away but a really missional approach to a gospel-centered effort to redeem culture should inspire us to see that the Bible speaks to everything in life and that means we should be able to move all the lawn chairs. Whether the old cultural warriors like Dobson and Falwell made a point of taking America back for God or whether newer sorts of self-appointed vanguards of evangelicalism like Mark Driscoll want Christians to "go upstream" where culture gets made (in the big urban areas) the style may seem different but to secularists, progressives, and anyone not already in the broadly American evangelical Protestant camp wouldn't all of this look like a distinction without a difference?
Collin Hansen lists the top-ten theology stories of the year. Number ten is the boom-and-bust cycle of Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin. Hansen goes on to wonder why Christians follow celebrities and don’t reflect on failure (possibly because the Gospel Coalition is built on fame and ignores the troubles of folks like C. J. Mahaney):
Tebow wasted away on the New York Jets bench behind an inept starter after the Broncos traded him and prospered under the precision passing of Peyton Manning. Lin also left his team when the Knicks declined to mach an offer from the Houston Rockets, where’s he’s played reasonably well. Why would God not want these men to succeed and spread the gospel through a growing platform in the nation’s largest city? How can they testify to Christ in failure and disappointment? Too few have explored these questions with the same fervency that greeted their ascendance to international celebrity.If the young and restless would-be Calvinists read much in the history of Calvinism they would know that failure and defeat is par for the course of the church militant (neo-Calvinists’ postmillennial optimism to the contrary).
But to be something other than postmillenial is to be pessimillenial, right?
And in a sample flourish of why D. G. Hart is considered by some to be a "Grumpy Calvinist" ... :
http://www.opc.org/os.html?article_id=269&issue_id=67
... However we estimate the size, scope, and power of the modern nation-state, the reality is that Reformed Protestantism was on the ground floor of the construction of modern Europe and its colonial proliferation, a period that ran from 1600 at least to World War II. No wonder, then, that conservative Reformed believers pine for the days when their faith mattered to the mission of a particular nation. Scottish Presbyterians still long for the days of the National Covenant. Abraham Kuyper endeared himself to Reformed believers by evoking a golden age of Dutch history. Meanwhile, American Presbyterians have their own version of this nostalgia and attempt to construct a Christian founding of the United States even though the very point of the new nation was to bring an end to the pattern of confessionalization that had torn apart Europe (and especially England) during the seventeenth century.
Yet, the question remains whether Reformed Protestants were hoping to remake Europe or reform the church. Thanks to a host of Holy Roman Emperors, from Constantine and Charlemagne to Charles V, thinking about Europe apart from the church was impossible. Even so, the reforms that the original Protestants initiated were overwhelmingly ecclesial and bore directly on doctrine, liturgy, and church polity. Only because the church was part of the established political order did church reform translate into broader social and political developments. The Reformation was first and foremost a religious effort and only secondarily did it affect politics and culture.
The desire fo revival to bring about national transformation is so endemic to American spirituality that the idea that there are ways of being Christian that are not predicated on the tacit assumption that "real" Christianity will transform a society into something by process of a kind of spiritual social reverse-engineering process is often not on the table. Now, surely, if a Christian influence in society improves things that's nice ... but the Metro-Evangelicals sometimes seem to frame transformation of culture as having an importance that can take precedence over being salt and light in mundane ways. And after all has been said and done (as if) was the goal of reaching the culture for Jesus to really do this for Jesus, who by Christian belief already owns everything that exists anyway, or was it to, through the promulgation of Jesus as savior, reverse-engineer, if possible, the culture into something closer to what we were hoping to see?
This world may be passing away but a really missional approach to a gospel-centered effort to redeem culture should inspire us to see that the Bible speaks to everything in life and that means we should be able to move all the lawn chairs. Whether the old cultural warriors like Dobson and Falwell made a point of taking America back for God or whether newer sorts of self-appointed vanguards of evangelicalism like Mark Driscoll want Christians to "go upstream" where culture gets made (in the big urban areas) the style may seem different but to secularists, progressives, and anyone not already in the broadly American evangelical Protestant camp wouldn't all of this look like a distinction without a difference?
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
a few things planned for 2013 ...
Those who grew up in but outgrew premillenial dispensationalism were probably not fretting at all about the alleged Mayan apocalypse. Thus it was with Wenatchee The Hatchet. Instead of mulling over end times stuff thoughts have been turned more toward fun things to eventually blog about in 2013.
How about an analysis of "Cirex" as an example of the chamber music for double-bass and guitar of
Annette Kruisbrink? Sound fun? Well, sounds fun to Wenatchee The Hatchet. How about a brief analysis of a Samuel Adler duet? Possibly some short album reviews of chamber music for guitar & saxophone, or guitar and mandolin, or guitar and bassoon? We might go there.
This year there was this movie in which a character quoted a line from an old movie about how big things can have small beginnings. Sometimes a thing can seem to end up small that began big, maybe even about $4 million big?
Curiosity made some news exploring Mars this year and curiosity has led to exploring bits of the Martian landscape that cartographers have not, at least on blogs, necessarily paid much attention to (except, in one case, Halden Doerge, maybe). You won't see any awesome pictures of the Martian landscape in 2013 at this blog ... but you might get to read an overview of what can be observed about recipients of a masters in missional leadership and an overview of the run-up to a program that's ... taking a break, maybe. We might even do a little bit of research to look at case studies of graduates re:train our eyes on the topic a bit more in 2013.
But that's for 2013. Hope you all had safe and pleasant holidays.
How about an analysis of "Cirex" as an example of the chamber music for double-bass and guitar of
Annette Kruisbrink? Sound fun? Well, sounds fun to Wenatchee The Hatchet. How about a brief analysis of a Samuel Adler duet? Possibly some short album reviews of chamber music for guitar & saxophone, or guitar and mandolin, or guitar and bassoon? We might go there.
This year there was this movie in which a character quoted a line from an old movie about how big things can have small beginnings. Sometimes a thing can seem to end up small that began big, maybe even about $4 million big?
Curiosity made some news exploring Mars this year and curiosity has led to exploring bits of the Martian landscape that cartographers have not, at least on blogs, necessarily paid much attention to (except, in one case, Halden Doerge, maybe). You won't see any awesome pictures of the Martian landscape in 2013 at this blog ... but you might get to read an overview of what can be observed about recipients of a masters in missional leadership and an overview of the run-up to a program that's ... taking a break, maybe. We might even do a little bit of research to look at case studies of graduates re:train our eyes on the topic a bit more in 2013.
But that's for 2013. Hope you all had safe and pleasant holidays.
Mere Orthodoxy: Are the Metro-Evangelicals right?
http://www.mereorthodoxy.com/are-the-metro-evangelicals-right/#more-123702
... there is a timbre amidst all of this city-centrism that troubles me.
Maybe this is because the metro-evangelicals are not counter-cultural, but rather a baptized version of New Urbanism. In a culture that idolizes living in a loft in a gentrifying art district, a church planter is not exactly bearing a cross in deciding to “rough it” under such conditions.
Maybe it is that some of its advocates tell a story that previous generations fearfully abdicated the dirty, sinful cities. Thus, all this new “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” generation needs do is show up and things will get better. It’s worth noting that this mythical Evangelical abandonment never really happened and we should be more careful at imputing impure motives to previous generations of believers.
Or maybe the metro-evangelicals’ claims of self-importance are so hyperbolic that they insult the gospel work being done in less densely populated zipcodes. For example, some urbanist church planters claim that cultural transformation emanates exclusively from cities, as Mark Driscoll writes:
I did my time in the Big Apple, but now reside in a thriving metropolis of 8,305. Yet I live alongside a whole lot of faithful Christians who sacrificially love their neighbors, share the gospel, build civil society and raise their families in the fear and admonition of the Lord. It may take some time, but I would wager that these folks will have some kind of transformative impact on the culture when all is said and done.
Remember the story of Abraham and Lot. When they parted ways over business squabbles, Lot chose to pitch his tent near the affluent big city while Abraham sojourned in wilderness isolation. Yet which of them ended up displaying a greater capacity for cultural transformation?
Cities may seem to be of more strategic importance but as some authors at Seattle's local paper The Stranger have insisted, cities are also often more liberal (language warning well in advance for those who've never heard of this paper).
For people who imagine that great innovations happen in the great cities and thus that's where we should focus our effort you can buy that but the thing about history is that history isn't always made in the big places where you might expect it to be and not always through easily anticipated means. While in Haydn's time Vienna was the place to be he didn't exactly change the history of music by being in Vienna for most of his career. These days people might sooner think of the film Showgirls than Haydn when hearing or reading the name Esterhazy. Such is life. Haydn managed to become famous across the world while being stuck in an estate in Hungary even though Vienna was consider the hot spot to be.
As Tom Wolfe put it in The Painted Word, an artist can go get Windsor & Newton paints just about anywhere in Ohio but they dream of "the loft" in "the city", THE city, New York.
Palestine was not exactly the most important place in the world at the time Jesus showed up, was it?
... there is a timbre amidst all of this city-centrism that troubles me.
Maybe this is because the metro-evangelicals are not counter-cultural, but rather a baptized version of New Urbanism. In a culture that idolizes living in a loft in a gentrifying art district, a church planter is not exactly bearing a cross in deciding to “rough it” under such conditions.
Maybe it is that some of its advocates tell a story that previous generations fearfully abdicated the dirty, sinful cities. Thus, all this new “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” generation needs do is show up and things will get better. It’s worth noting that this mythical Evangelical abandonment never really happened and we should be more careful at imputing impure motives to previous generations of believers.
Or maybe the metro-evangelicals’ claims of self-importance are so hyperbolic that they insult the gospel work being done in less densely populated zipcodes. For example, some urbanist church planters claim that cultural transformation emanates exclusively from cities, as Mark Driscoll writes:
[C]ities are of greater strategic importance because they are upstream where culture is made and changed, yet most Christians today are downstream and subsequently are incapable of effecting cultural transformation. (Vintage Church, p. 298)Incapable. Incapable? I do not think that word means what you think it means. /Inigo_Montoya_voice
I did my time in the Big Apple, but now reside in a thriving metropolis of 8,305. Yet I live alongside a whole lot of faithful Christians who sacrificially love their neighbors, share the gospel, build civil society and raise their families in the fear and admonition of the Lord. It may take some time, but I would wager that these folks will have some kind of transformative impact on the culture when all is said and done.
Remember the story of Abraham and Lot. When they parted ways over business squabbles, Lot chose to pitch his tent near the affluent big city while Abraham sojourned in wilderness isolation. Yet which of them ended up displaying a greater capacity for cultural transformation?
Cities may seem to be of more strategic importance but as some authors at Seattle's local paper The Stranger have insisted, cities are also often more liberal (language warning well in advance for those who've never heard of this paper).
For people who imagine that great innovations happen in the great cities and thus that's where we should focus our effort you can buy that but the thing about history is that history isn't always made in the big places where you might expect it to be and not always through easily anticipated means. While in Haydn's time Vienna was the place to be he didn't exactly change the history of music by being in Vienna for most of his career. These days people might sooner think of the film Showgirls than Haydn when hearing or reading the name Esterhazy. Such is life. Haydn managed to become famous across the world while being stuck in an estate in Hungary even though Vienna was consider the hot spot to be.
As Tom Wolfe put it in The Painted Word, an artist can go get Windsor & Newton paints just about anywhere in Ohio but they dream of "the loft" in "the city", THE city, New York.
Palestine was not exactly the most important place in the world at the time Jesus showed up, was it?
Sunday, December 23, 2012
JS Bangs: A Call to Inaction
http://jsbangs.com/2012/12/18/memento-mori-a-call-to-inaction/
Bangs inks to this and shares a few of his own thoughts.
I'll quote from part of the linked article:
Bangs inks to this and shares a few of his own thoughts.
I'll quote from part of the linked article:
Unlike many libertarians, I am fine with a ban on automatic weapons. But no need to hop over to Change.org to start a petition to ban them; machine guns have been illegal in the United States since 1934, and since the 1980s, it has been illegal to manufacture and sell any automatic weapon. Apparently unbeknownst to Twitter, we have also already made it illegal for the mentally ill to buy or have guns, and have background checks aimed at prevented just that.
But beyond the strange calls to make serial killers pray more and outlaw things that are already illegal, the most interesting thing is how generic they were. As soon as Newtown happened, people reached into a mental basket already full of "ways to stop school shootings" and pulled out a few of their favorite items. They did not stop to find out whether those causes had actually obtained in this case.
So a ban on things that are already illegal wouldn't have made what happened less likely to happen. Armed schoolteachers would not have made a shooter less likely to shoot a bunch of people. Violent video games can't be construed as necessarily having caused what happened. Even if we account for a synergy of all the independent variables there's no way we can really say that what happened was something that could have been prevented by any one magical policy change any of us would like to see implemented. There will be no end, however, to ideologically driven idiots left, right or even libertarian proposing that now is the time to exploit the occasion to push for something that seems reasonable to one proponent and insane to others. But perhaps the real insanity is imagining that in a world as big as ours with the possibilities it has that these kinds of massacres either "shouldn't" happen or "couldn't" happen even after we've done everything possible.
Some of my married friends have said that there is no form of birth prevention that is 100% failproof. Sometimes despite all odds a baby is conceived and born. Death is the same way, it can burst in upon us no matter what reasonable precautions we may take to forestall or completely evade death in any given circumstance.
At close enough range with enough velocity even rubber bullets can kill people.
And everything with it. What is sad is that I've seen people who backed Gulf War II and the War on Terror eight and ten years ago who, now that a Democrat is in office, believe that the things they backed years ago as necessary are civil rights violations now. Why is this sad? It should be obvious but it probably won't be to everyone--ideologues don't care that solution A to problem B seems like a tyrannical act just so long as group C didn't come up with it or isn't able to implement it but if "my" group does, then it's necessary.
There is, as Bangs puts it:
I understand that we want to do something. But sometimes we must consider the fact that there is nothing to be done.
Those people died and that's as obvious as it gets that there is nothing now that could be done to have saved them and there's not necessarily anything that could be done that is constitutional that will prevent such a thing from happening in the future.
There could be a disturbed young man here in my town. Tomorrow he could steal a weapon, go to the preschool, and kill my boys. There is nothing I could do to stop him.
This is the fear that haunts the calls to action. This could happen to any of us. And if it did, there is nothing we could do about it—but we desperately wish that there was.
So a ban on things that are already illegal wouldn't have made what happened less likely to happen. Armed schoolteachers would not have made a shooter less likely to shoot a bunch of people. Violent video games can't be construed as necessarily having caused what happened. Even if we account for a synergy of all the independent variables there's no way we can really say that what happened was something that could have been prevented by any one magical policy change any of us would like to see implemented. There will be no end, however, to ideologically driven idiots left, right or even libertarian proposing that now is the time to exploit the occasion to push for something that seems reasonable to one proponent and insane to others. But perhaps the real insanity is imagining that in a world as big as ours with the possibilities it has that these kinds of massacres either "shouldn't" happen or "couldn't" happen even after we've done everything possible.
Some of my married friends have said that there is no form of birth prevention that is 100% failproof. Sometimes despite all odds a baby is conceived and born. Death is the same way, it can burst in upon us no matter what reasonable precautions we may take to forestall or completely evade death in any given circumstance.
At close enough range with enough velocity even rubber bullets can kill people.
There's a terrible syllogism that tends to follow on tragedies like this:
1. Something must be done
2. This is something
3. Therefore this must be done.
. . . and hello, Gulf War II.
And everything with it. What is sad is that I've seen people who backed Gulf War II and the War on Terror eight and ten years ago who, now that a Democrat is in office, believe that the things they backed years ago as necessary are civil rights violations now. Why is this sad? It should be obvious but it probably won't be to everyone--ideologues don't care that solution A to problem B seems like a tyrannical act just so long as group C didn't come up with it or isn't able to implement it but if "my" group does, then it's necessary.
There is, as Bangs puts it:
I understand that we want to do something. But sometimes we must consider the fact that there is nothing to be done.
Those people died and that's as obvious as it gets that there is nothing now that could be done to have saved them and there's not necessarily anything that could be done that is constitutional that will prevent such a thing from happening in the future.
There could be a disturbed young man here in my town. Tomorrow he could steal a weapon, go to the preschool, and kill my boys. There is nothing I could do to stop him.
This is the fear that haunts the calls to action. This could happen to any of us. And if it did, there is nothing we could do about it—but we desperately wish that there was.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Update on Lief Moi HT Joyful Exiles
http://www.issaquahreporter.com/news/182419011.html
HT Joyful Exiles
Longtime readers will know pretty much why the semi-dormancy is "semi" when updates of this sort get published.
HT Joyful Exiles
Longtime readers will know pretty much why the semi-dormancy is "semi" when updates of this sort get published.
Tim Challies reviews James MacDonald's Vertical Church with a mixed assessment.
Some of you long-time readers may remember that my first impression of James MacDonald was a distinctly bad one. His name showed up in a post titled something like "With friends like these multisite churches don't need enemies". I have linked only sporadically to things connected to The Elephant's Debt. Blogger Tim Challies has of late reviewed Vertical Church and he likes, as he puts it, 120 pages of the 300. The trouble is, which Challies discusses at at least a little length, the bad in the other 300 outweighs the good in the 120.
The set-up, Challies writes, is promising and the concepts about worship in particular are good ... but the application turns out, according to Challies, to be weak and even dangerous in terms of practical application. At length the blogger notes that he simply could not review the book on the terms of the book itself and had to consider the last two or three years of James MacDonald's public conduct and speech in his pastoral role and finding it wanting in several areas.
http://www.challies.com/book-reviews/vertical-church
... [on prayer] MacDonald too often allows his personal and culture preferences and his extroverted personality to be prescriptive.
And then there are times where he shows shockingly poor judgment in illustrating with his own life. At one point he writes about the role of prayer in saving his church from bankruptcy. He prayed to the Lord and then called a contractor whose work had been woefully substandard. “Sensing the Lord infusing [him] with still greater boldness” he told this man, “If you do not ship the remaining steel for free, we will close the construction project permanently, take the entire church into bankruptcy, and I will spend the rest of my life pursuing a legal remedy for all damages incurred by your company’s failure to perform. You have until tomorrow at five o’clock to give me your answer, but don’t call at 5:05, because there is a big part of me now hoping your answer is no.” This kind of personal intimidation does not at all stand as an example of the fruit of the Spirit
This blog does not, as a rule, tend to keep very close track of MacDonald because he's not much in our neck of the woods. He may be a good friend to a certain preacher now, for however long that lasts, but there've been good friends over the years about whom nary a word has been said in public as of years ago. Times and places and namees uttered publicly in affection can be fickle. It is not a given that the latest named good friend may be so for any longer than the good friend who co-founded a venture. Besides, there are other people who sometimes keep tabs on MacDonald (about 40:28)so that blogs like Wenatchee The Hatchet can accumulate ideas for blogging about music by Samuel Adler (into the ... 2013 year) or about some graduates of a school.
But that's stuff that may or may not pop up in detail in 2013. We're semi-dormant here at Wenatchee The Hatchet. There'll be some activity
The set-up, Challies writes, is promising and the concepts about worship in particular are good ... but the application turns out, according to Challies, to be weak and even dangerous in terms of practical application. At length the blogger notes that he simply could not review the book on the terms of the book itself and had to consider the last two or three years of James MacDonald's public conduct and speech in his pastoral role and finding it wanting in several areas.
http://www.challies.com/book-reviews/vertical-church
... [on prayer] MacDonald too often allows his personal and culture preferences and his extroverted personality to be prescriptive.
And then there are times where he shows shockingly poor judgment in illustrating with his own life. At one point he writes about the role of prayer in saving his church from bankruptcy. He prayed to the Lord and then called a contractor whose work had been woefully substandard. “Sensing the Lord infusing [him] with still greater boldness” he told this man, “If you do not ship the remaining steel for free, we will close the construction project permanently, take the entire church into bankruptcy, and I will spend the rest of my life pursuing a legal remedy for all damages incurred by your company’s failure to perform. You have until tomorrow at five o’clock to give me your answer, but don’t call at 5:05, because there is a big part of me now hoping your answer is no.” This kind of personal intimidation does not at all stand as an example of the fruit of the Spirit
This blog does not, as a rule, tend to keep very close track of MacDonald because he's not much in our neck of the woods. He may be a good friend to a certain preacher now, for however long that lasts, but there've been good friends over the years about whom nary a word has been said in public as of years ago. Times and places and namees uttered publicly in affection can be fickle. It is not a given that the latest named good friend may be so for any longer than the good friend who co-founded a venture. Besides, there are other people who sometimes keep tabs on MacDonald (about 40:28)so that blogs like Wenatchee The Hatchet can accumulate ideas for blogging about music by Samuel Adler (into the ... 2013 year) or about some graduates of a school.
But that's stuff that may or may not pop up in detail in 2013. We're semi-dormant here at Wenatchee The Hatchet. There'll be some activity
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Mars Hill Trademark/Logo clarification from October 22, 2011 and your church (maybe)
http://marshill.com/2011/10/22/clarification-on-some-rumors-that-have-been-on-some-blogs/
This blog post from us is intended to alleviate any confusion. As a clarification, we have not sued any churches and have no plans to sue any churches. We have not sent any similar letters to any other "Mars Hill" churches, and we are not planning on asking any church with "Mars Hill" in their name to change their name.
In light of the above if your church, or the church of someone you know, has been approached by anyone from Mars Hill since October 22, 2011 with a request that you change your name ask them when and if they changed their mind about this statement. As a clarification, since we blogged about the subject of name, trademark and logo associated with Mars Hill a month ago it seemed useful to set out clearly what Mars Hill said they had not done and did not plan to do, just in case Mars Hill might have done something that could be understood as a reversal of the publicly announced stance they decided to take back in October 2011.
Since the "Clarification" has no by-line or credited author then, in lieu of an actual name to back up the reliability of the above-quoted statement made by Mars Hill last year, questions could conceivably get run by Justin Dean, currently overseeing public relations, communications, and social media for Mars Hill. Not that Wenatchee The Hatchet actually has any questions on this subject ... but you might. Dean has had a public role in clarifying previously unclear communication such was what took place in the disciplinary case of a former member named Andrew. We'll let you go look up that Slate article yourself, though. This blog post from us is intended to alleviate any confusion.
This blog post from us is intended to alleviate any confusion. As a clarification, we have not sued any churches and have no plans to sue any churches. We have not sent any similar letters to any other "Mars Hill" churches, and we are not planning on asking any church with "Mars Hill" in their name to change their name.
In light of the above if your church, or the church of someone you know, has been approached by anyone from Mars Hill since October 22, 2011 with a request that you change your name ask them when and if they changed their mind about this statement. As a clarification, since we blogged about the subject of name, trademark and logo associated with Mars Hill a month ago it seemed useful to set out clearly what Mars Hill said they had not done and did not plan to do, just in case Mars Hill might have done something that could be understood as a reversal of the publicly announced stance they decided to take back in October 2011.
Since the "Clarification" has no by-line or credited author then, in lieu of an actual name to back up the reliability of the above-quoted statement made by Mars Hill last year, questions could conceivably get run by Justin Dean, currently overseeing public relations, communications, and social media for Mars Hill. Not that Wenatchee The Hatchet actually has any questions on this subject ... but you might. Dean has had a public role in clarifying previously unclear communication such was what took place in the disciplinary case of a former member named Andrew. We'll let you go look up that Slate article yourself, though. This blog post from us is intended to alleviate any confusion.
dormancy, sorta
As you'll have noticed we're not quite so productive in blogging here at Wenatchee The Hatchet as earlier this year. You'll see from the blog archive that there was an explosion of activity on the blog this year but in the last few months the output has shrunk down to more conventional productivity. This may be how things stay for a little while.
But there are plenty of things in the hopper to eventually, here's hoping, make it up here. We've kept track of a few things that didn't get a lot of coverage from other blogs or from media outlets. This is a niche blog (as all blogs in the end probably must be). So there were blog posts about a certain church and its real estate acquisitions and bylaws and culture. There were blog posts dealing with chamber music. There were blog posts dealing with superheroes. There are various other blog posts and about those we have no need to get overly detailed.
With a bit of input from blogging friends like Wendy and Bill we've got a drastically different look that, I hope, makes the blog easier to read. I've also actually bothered to tag posts with themes which will facilitate easier searches on topics that may be of interest to people. There's still a mountain of completely untagged stuff you could search through if you like but at least this year I started tagging stuff for easier referencing.
Either we'll actually have a bundle of content prepared for 2013 or we won't. We can't make any promises there.
But there are plenty of things in the hopper to eventually, here's hoping, make it up here. We've kept track of a few things that didn't get a lot of coverage from other blogs or from media outlets. This is a niche blog (as all blogs in the end probably must be). So there were blog posts about a certain church and its real estate acquisitions and bylaws and culture. There were blog posts dealing with chamber music. There were blog posts dealing with superheroes. There are various other blog posts and about those we have no need to get overly detailed.
With a bit of input from blogging friends like Wendy and Bill we've got a drastically different look that, I hope, makes the blog easier to read. I've also actually bothered to tag posts with themes which will facilitate easier searches on topics that may be of interest to people. There's still a mountain of completely untagged stuff you could search through if you like but at least this year I started tagging stuff for easier referencing.
Either we'll actually have a bundle of content prepared for 2013 or we won't. We can't make any promises there.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Kitten Doesn't Like Apples
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1F-CokXNU
Nice synchronization of the soundtrack to movement in this video. If Henri the Black Cat is existentialist French cinema than this is, well, the Ridley Scott horror film alternative., obviously.
Nice synchronization of the soundtrack to movement in this video. If Henri the Black Cat is existentialist French cinema than this is, well, the Ridley Scott horror film alternative., obviously.
and while we're at it, Nikita Koshkin's Suite for guitar "The Prince's Toys"
The Mischievious Prince
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS0Y-G_LyHQ&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=56
Mechanical Monkey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbh66uHz4zM&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=57
Doll with Blinking Eyes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TMisPIf1U8&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=58
Tin Soldiers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U2uBsof7mo&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=59
The Price's Coach
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6PIKdjl0MQ&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=60
Grand parade of the Toys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnpTWnVmIvc&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=61
There are a couple of CDs on which this fine suite has been recorded and there's a neat doctoral dissertation on Koshkin's solo guitar music that's been published as of about six years ago. I don't remember the details off the top of my head so I'll let you hunt around for stuff if you like Koshkin's music and are discovering it. I think if I had to pick favorites from Koshkin this suite for solo guitar and his sonata for flute and guitar would be my favorites.
Way back when I started this blog I wanted to write a blog about cross-movement cyclical development of motiff in Koshkin's sonata for flute and guitar. I might yet finally get around to doing that. You're going to have to accept that this will not include musical excerpts because I'm not interested in breaching copyright. I could, however, link to Koshkin's neat videos of the performance of his sonata and provide explanatory notes of how certain themes derive from a motto that opens the work. But all that's for later ... and by later I mean possibly out into 2013.
Anyway, enjoy the suite.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS0Y-G_LyHQ&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=56
Mechanical Monkey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbh66uHz4zM&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=57
Doll with Blinking Eyes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TMisPIf1U8&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=58
Tin Soldiers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U2uBsof7mo&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=59
The Price's Coach
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6PIKdjl0MQ&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=60
Grand parade of the Toys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnpTWnVmIvc&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=61
There are a couple of CDs on which this fine suite has been recorded and there's a neat doctoral dissertation on Koshkin's solo guitar music that's been published as of about six years ago. I don't remember the details off the top of my head so I'll let you hunt around for stuff if you like Koshkin's music and are discovering it. I think if I had to pick favorites from Koshkin this suite for solo guitar and his sonata for flute and guitar would be my favorites.
Way back when I started this blog I wanted to write a blog about cross-movement cyclical development of motiff in Koshkin's sonata for flute and guitar. I might yet finally get around to doing that. You're going to have to accept that this will not include musical excerpts because I'm not interested in breaching copyright. I could, however, link to Koshkin's neat videos of the performance of his sonata and provide explanatory notes of how certain themes derive from a motto that opens the work. But all that's for later ... and by later I mean possibly out into 2013.
Anyway, enjoy the suite.
Asya Selyutina plays Koshkin's Usher Waltz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvyJY7WDIzw&list=UU466ME1RFgERiTBg1wlF9eQ&index=35
On the one hand her recordings of his 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar and their publication by Editions Margaux can't come soon enough. On the other hand, we don't want to rsuh a project like this that is, so far as I know, unprecedented in the history of the instrument, a contrapuntal cycle composed for the guitar by an guitarist (give or take focal dystonia). For now, Selyutina does a nice job with Koshkin's most famous waltz.
On the one hand her recordings of his 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar and their publication by Editions Margaux can't come soon enough. On the other hand, we don't want to rsuh a project like this that is, so far as I know, unprecedented in the history of the instrument, a contrapuntal cycle composed for the guitar by an guitarist (give or take focal dystonia). For now, Selyutina does a nice job with Koshkin's most famous waltz.
Nikita Kohskin: Megaron Concerto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3vCbp3dEi8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYqVb--AxPM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP98lwcFEcg&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEM_oB6rLQI
I haven't written about music in a while, though I had planned to. Still collecting a variety of thoughts and ideas. So instead of attempting to blog about music again before I think I'm actually ready to do so let's just link to the recently completed and premiered guitar concerto by Nikita Koshkin.
The concerto is on CD and is available this year, I think on the BIS label. Concerti are okay, for my interests it's that the new CD has a quintet for guitar and string quartet that intrigues me. I admit to liking the guitar more when it has a smaller, more intimate canvas. On the other hand, fun though it is we guitarists don't want to keep hearing just Concierto de Aranjuez forever and ever, amen, so the possibility of a new concerto to be an alternative might be nice, too. :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYqVb--AxPM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP98lwcFEcg&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEM_oB6rLQI
I haven't written about music in a while, though I had planned to. Still collecting a variety of thoughts and ideas. So instead of attempting to blog about music again before I think I'm actually ready to do so let's just link to the recently completed and premiered guitar concerto by Nikita Koshkin.
The concerto is on CD and is available this year, I think on the BIS label. Concerti are okay, for my interests it's that the new CD has a quintet for guitar and string quartet that intrigues me. I admit to liking the guitar more when it has a smaller, more intimate canvas. On the other hand, fun though it is we guitarists don't want to keep hearing just Concierto de Aranjuez forever and ever, amen, so the possibility of a new concerto to be an alternative might be nice, too. :)
Thursday, December 13, 2012
cinemagogue, the book
http://cinemagogue.com/2012/12/12/cinemagogue-the-book/
Of course Wenatchee The Hatchet is going to note this bit of news, if a day late. Follow the link and see what James Harleman's written, particularly if you went to any of his Film & Theology presentations over the last twelve years.
Of course Wenatchee The Hatchet is going to note this bit of news, if a day late. Follow the link and see what James Harleman's written, particularly if you went to any of his Film & Theology presentations over the last twelve years.
Monday, December 10, 2012
a fun (and long) post on damned Raimi protagonists is up at Cinemagogue
http://cinemagogue.com/2012/12/10/that-damned-protagonist-hell-is-for-raimis-heroes/
Of course Cinemagogue has an overview of protagonists in Sam Raimi films. After all, Oz is coming out soon enough and Cinemaguy's affection for Raimi's work is easily looked up. Drag Me to Hell was a fun movie! Not every story has to end with "redemption". Often, as Harleman pointed out in his presentation on District 9 (if memory serves) so much of the time we moviegoers are used to a story of "redemption" in which a guy on the wrong team realizes he's on the wrong team, has a change of heart, turns around and goes from being a peon for evil to being the hero and savior in his own narrative. If you want a stereotypical example of this sort of story look to James Cameron's Avatar. District 9 provides us with a protagonist who manages to stop being on the side of oppression and injustice but who never really becomes the "hero" that we've been primed to think he should be by American action conventions.
Well when Sam Raimi's not playing with characters created by other people he's got no problem depicting people who seem "good" and turn out to make harrowing, awful decisions that destroy the lives of others and which lead to their own damnation. In the case of Drag Me To Hell that damnation of the self is just as literally realized in the story as the title tells you it will be.
Of course Cinemagogue has an overview of protagonists in Sam Raimi films. After all, Oz is coming out soon enough and Cinemaguy's affection for Raimi's work is easily looked up. Drag Me to Hell was a fun movie! Not every story has to end with "redemption". Often, as Harleman pointed out in his presentation on District 9 (if memory serves) so much of the time we moviegoers are used to a story of "redemption" in which a guy on the wrong team realizes he's on the wrong team, has a change of heart, turns around and goes from being a peon for evil to being the hero and savior in his own narrative. If you want a stereotypical example of this sort of story look to James Cameron's Avatar. District 9 provides us with a protagonist who manages to stop being on the side of oppression and injustice but who never really becomes the "hero" that we've been primed to think he should be by American action conventions.
Well when Sam Raimi's not playing with characters created by other people he's got no problem depicting people who seem "good" and turn out to make harrowing, awful decisions that destroy the lives of others and which lead to their own damnation. In the case of Drag Me To Hell that damnation of the self is just as literally realized in the story as the title tells you it will be.
Sunday, December 09, 2012
Skyfall: places of shadows and people who pull triggers
There's plenty that's been written about the new Bond movie Skyfall in the last month. By now if you don't know it's Judi Dench's last film as M then, well, er, spoiler alert? ;-)
A bit has been made of the observation that the new James Bond movie depicts an older, depressive Bond who dislikes the nature of his work and has become too old to pass field work tests and probably has substance abuse issues. Yet Bond shows up for duty even after he's identified as dead during a battle in which a field agent attempts to shoot a data thief and, through her own failures in aim, shoots 007. Cue one of the few actually decent Bond songs in the last ten years.
Bond returns, like an old Bruce Wayne comes out of retirement to deal with an evil that the new generation of cops can't understand or defeat. James Bond Returns. But he returns to an MI6 that is positive it doesn't really need him any longer. Mallory, whom Bond describes as "a bureaucrat", makes a blunt petition to M (Judi Dench) about her team's failure to prevent the data theft. He says M has had a good run and that there's no dishonor in retiring early and getting a pension and that after such a big failure it's okay to retire and retain some dignity. To this M replies indignantly, "To hell with dignity! I want the job done." This becomes a thread through the film in which there are people who work in and with MI6 who consider personal standing or renown or welfare and those who say "to hell with dignity ... ."
But an equally obvious theme in the storyline has to do with "the shadows". Mallory tells M that she and Bond are, basically, relics from a Cold War time, a bygone era whose methods and tools are no longer relevant. Working in the shadows doesn't make any sense when, thanks to modern technology and information resources, there aren't any shadows. When Bond is equipped with a gun and radio by Q, the young man mentions, "I can do more damage in a single day with a laptop than you can in a whole year out in the field" (I paraphrase). Bond retorts with a question of why on earth he even needs to be around at all. The obviously strictly indoor Q says, "Eventually somebody has to pull a trigger." Later in the film Q will unwittingly let the necessary villain (Silva) break into the data systems of MI6 and Silva attempts to assasinate M during a hearing on problems in MI6 security and policy.
It is during the hearing that M explains why MI6 still needs to exist, because the changing nature of the enemy means the adversary is no longer a nation or an army but those who dwell in the shadows. This is possibly the first James Bond movie that has a theme and at least one potential theme in the film is the question of what the shadows are. Mallory believes the shadows don't exist and M is certain that they not only exist but that both the evils that face society (like Silva) emerge from there and that Bond has lived within the shadows and is the sort of person who can fight men like Silva. At length Silva turns out to have been a former agent of MI6 who overstepped his authorization and clearance, risked compromising MI6's operations, and was given over by M to Chinese authorities during the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong to China. Some have written that this backstory is implausible. Okay, so what exactly is supposed to be "plausible" in a James Bond story can be discussed at some other time.
M's point in the film about the shadows invites a question (for those who actually feel like asking these sorts of questions), what are the shadows and where are they? Even after Mallory said there were no more shadows MI6 is blindsided by an attack from a former agent. The shadows are not merely some place or places but gaps in attention. The shadows are where the people in the light are not looking, even if everything might otherwise be bathed in light. The shadows are in the details you missed, the people you overlooked, the directions in which you were not looking. This is the world in which James Bond, in pretty much any incarnation, has always lived. The shadows, again, are not merely where there is no light, the shadows exist where there is some light (even) but you're not looking.
In a gun fight in the hearing room the younger generation that would see Bond and the old M kindly on their way into some dignified retirement are all attempting to make killshots on Silva, who has come into to kill M for what he believes was her treachery toward him. As people like Mallory and the field agent who will turn out to be the famous desk agent Eve Moneypenny attempt to shoot to kill and fail Bond pulls out his gun. He shoots to confuse, using his famous Walther PPK to saturate the courtroom with fire retardants from the fire extinguishers in the room. Silva ends up being thwarted, of course, not by the youngsters who have said there are no shadows anymore and that M should step down, but by the man who is considered physically, mentally, and emotionally unfit to be in the fight, our dear old James Bond. As Q put it, eventually someone has to pull a trigger and Bond's reticence about his work is how often and why a trigger has to be pulled. Having been shown unable to make easy shots after being wounded in the moment of real crisis Bond, of course, comes through and has true aim.
Of course the usual blandishments of the Bond franchise are present but the Bond girl motiff takes a tertiary role to the aforementioned themes. The most important Bond woman in this film is M and it's fitting that after being in the franchise so many years Judi Dench is given an actually significant role. Severine ends up being almost purely incidental, the path to Silva. It's the agent revealed in the end to be Moneypenny who ends up being the second most important woman in Bond's travels in Skyfall, a well-meaning younger agent who has bad aim and taunts Bond about being the old dog who somehow learned new tricks. Unlike the other generation of youngsters Moneypenny is willing to take Bond's frank and unflattering advice that with the kind of aim she has he'd feel awfully safer knowing she wasn't firing guns out in the field and that she's not cut out for field work. By film's end Moneypenny turns out to accept Bond's blunt advice and Q has been humbled by the discovery that Silva was able to best his technology and defeat his laptop. This being a Bond movie that's no surprise.
Having said all that that's about as much as I think needs be said. The new Bond movie is a veritably solemn affair but it seems that Sam Mendes is better off giving Bond movies some actual themes than cranking out self-congratulatory films like American Beauty. Sometimes taking a big dumb movie franchise seriously and giving it some themes to play with is more fun that attemtping to be above genre trappings and being stuck in the most hoary convention of all, the shallow suburban existence in which dissatisfied people questing for meaning and personal fulfillment do ethically questionable things. After all, you can get that stuff in Bond movies and throw in a few chase scenes.
A bit has been made of the observation that the new James Bond movie depicts an older, depressive Bond who dislikes the nature of his work and has become too old to pass field work tests and probably has substance abuse issues. Yet Bond shows up for duty even after he's identified as dead during a battle in which a field agent attempts to shoot a data thief and, through her own failures in aim, shoots 007. Cue one of the few actually decent Bond songs in the last ten years.
Bond returns, like an old Bruce Wayne comes out of retirement to deal with an evil that the new generation of cops can't understand or defeat. James Bond Returns. But he returns to an MI6 that is positive it doesn't really need him any longer. Mallory, whom Bond describes as "a bureaucrat", makes a blunt petition to M (Judi Dench) about her team's failure to prevent the data theft. He says M has had a good run and that there's no dishonor in retiring early and getting a pension and that after such a big failure it's okay to retire and retain some dignity. To this M replies indignantly, "To hell with dignity! I want the job done." This becomes a thread through the film in which there are people who work in and with MI6 who consider personal standing or renown or welfare and those who say "to hell with dignity ... ."
But an equally obvious theme in the storyline has to do with "the shadows". Mallory tells M that she and Bond are, basically, relics from a Cold War time, a bygone era whose methods and tools are no longer relevant. Working in the shadows doesn't make any sense when, thanks to modern technology and information resources, there aren't any shadows. When Bond is equipped with a gun and radio by Q, the young man mentions, "I can do more damage in a single day with a laptop than you can in a whole year out in the field" (I paraphrase). Bond retorts with a question of why on earth he even needs to be around at all. The obviously strictly indoor Q says, "Eventually somebody has to pull a trigger." Later in the film Q will unwittingly let the necessary villain (Silva) break into the data systems of MI6 and Silva attempts to assasinate M during a hearing on problems in MI6 security and policy.
It is during the hearing that M explains why MI6 still needs to exist, because the changing nature of the enemy means the adversary is no longer a nation or an army but those who dwell in the shadows. This is possibly the first James Bond movie that has a theme and at least one potential theme in the film is the question of what the shadows are. Mallory believes the shadows don't exist and M is certain that they not only exist but that both the evils that face society (like Silva) emerge from there and that Bond has lived within the shadows and is the sort of person who can fight men like Silva. At length Silva turns out to have been a former agent of MI6 who overstepped his authorization and clearance, risked compromising MI6's operations, and was given over by M to Chinese authorities during the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong to China. Some have written that this backstory is implausible. Okay, so what exactly is supposed to be "plausible" in a James Bond story can be discussed at some other time.
M's point in the film about the shadows invites a question (for those who actually feel like asking these sorts of questions), what are the shadows and where are they? Even after Mallory said there were no more shadows MI6 is blindsided by an attack from a former agent. The shadows are not merely some place or places but gaps in attention. The shadows are where the people in the light are not looking, even if everything might otherwise be bathed in light. The shadows are in the details you missed, the people you overlooked, the directions in which you were not looking. This is the world in which James Bond, in pretty much any incarnation, has always lived. The shadows, again, are not merely where there is no light, the shadows exist where there is some light (even) but you're not looking.
In a gun fight in the hearing room the younger generation that would see Bond and the old M kindly on their way into some dignified retirement are all attempting to make killshots on Silva, who has come into to kill M for what he believes was her treachery toward him. As people like Mallory and the field agent who will turn out to be the famous desk agent Eve Moneypenny attempt to shoot to kill and fail Bond pulls out his gun. He shoots to confuse, using his famous Walther PPK to saturate the courtroom with fire retardants from the fire extinguishers in the room. Silva ends up being thwarted, of course, not by the youngsters who have said there are no shadows anymore and that M should step down, but by the man who is considered physically, mentally, and emotionally unfit to be in the fight, our dear old James Bond. As Q put it, eventually someone has to pull a trigger and Bond's reticence about his work is how often and why a trigger has to be pulled. Having been shown unable to make easy shots after being wounded in the moment of real crisis Bond, of course, comes through and has true aim.
Of course the usual blandishments of the Bond franchise are present but the Bond girl motiff takes a tertiary role to the aforementioned themes. The most important Bond woman in this film is M and it's fitting that after being in the franchise so many years Judi Dench is given an actually significant role. Severine ends up being almost purely incidental, the path to Silva. It's the agent revealed in the end to be Moneypenny who ends up being the second most important woman in Bond's travels in Skyfall, a well-meaning younger agent who has bad aim and taunts Bond about being the old dog who somehow learned new tricks. Unlike the other generation of youngsters Moneypenny is willing to take Bond's frank and unflattering advice that with the kind of aim she has he'd feel awfully safer knowing she wasn't firing guns out in the field and that she's not cut out for field work. By film's end Moneypenny turns out to accept Bond's blunt advice and Q has been humbled by the discovery that Silva was able to best his technology and defeat his laptop. This being a Bond movie that's no surprise.
Having said all that that's about as much as I think needs be said. The new Bond movie is a veritably solemn affair but it seems that Sam Mendes is better off giving Bond movies some actual themes than cranking out self-congratulatory films like American Beauty. Sometimes taking a big dumb movie franchise seriously and giving it some themes to play with is more fun that attemtping to be above genre trappings and being stuck in the most hoary convention of all, the shallow suburban existence in which dissatisfied people questing for meaning and personal fulfillment do ethically questionable things. After all, you can get that stuff in Bond movies and throw in a few chase scenes.
Old Life: When Transformation Transforms the Transformers
http://oldlife.org/2012/12/when-transformation-transforms-the-transformers/
... the example of the Amish (as Berry understands them) may also be instructive for those wanting to transform out culture. Instead of infiltrating the city to redeem it, the Amish have fled the dominant culture to cultivate a Christian culture (as they understand it). In so doing, they have avoided the problem that generally afflicts the infiltrators — that they become like the culture they inhabit, that is, in the case of city transformers, they become as urban and hip as they are Christian. The Amish are also apparently free from the self-delusion that often infects the transformationalists, then one where to justify redeeming the culture the cult loses what makes it distinct (the salt is no longer salt).
... This is not, by the way, an endorsement of either the Amish (whom I admire) or the project of Christian culture. I am more and more persuaded that the longing for a Christian culture is illegitimate and whets the soul’s appetite for something we cannot have in this world. But if you are going to look for examples of Christian culture, the Amish may have unwittingly outscored the neo-Calvinists. ...
A surprisingly sloppy post not so much in the ideas presented, which are clear enough, but in the word choice. Maybe the post was published using a mobile device that kicked in with auto-correct. The thoughts are, however, interesting enough that some obviously off-kilter words don't keep the idea from coming across. The Amish have cultivated a Christian culture that is robust and recognizable by not being in the culture around them. Neo-Calvinists, as yet, have not produced a culture that has become so recognizable or long-lasting and this "may" be because they haven't had time or, as Hart implies, they will always lack the foundation form which to build a "Christian culture" because the enterprise itself is dubious. Whether or not you agree with Hart on that is a matter all its own.
Having seen the earnestness with which some pastors in this area have said they want to win people to Jesus, people who will "move upstream" and "shape culture" I've also seen what can happen when people realize they are probably never going to move upstream and shape culture. They despair, they give up, they get resentful, and in some cases bail on church altogether. When a goal of Christian living is to "redeem culture" it may happen to happen but it ends up putting the cart before the horse.
I suppose I could write more on the matter but I don't feel like doing so.
... the example of the Amish (as Berry understands them) may also be instructive for those wanting to transform out culture. Instead of infiltrating the city to redeem it, the Amish have fled the dominant culture to cultivate a Christian culture (as they understand it). In so doing, they have avoided the problem that generally afflicts the infiltrators — that they become like the culture they inhabit, that is, in the case of city transformers, they become as urban and hip as they are Christian. The Amish are also apparently free from the self-delusion that often infects the transformationalists, then one where to justify redeeming the culture the cult loses what makes it distinct (the salt is no longer salt).
... This is not, by the way, an endorsement of either the Amish (whom I admire) or the project of Christian culture. I am more and more persuaded that the longing for a Christian culture is illegitimate and whets the soul’s appetite for something we cannot have in this world. But if you are going to look for examples of Christian culture, the Amish may have unwittingly outscored the neo-Calvinists. ...
A surprisingly sloppy post not so much in the ideas presented, which are clear enough, but in the word choice. Maybe the post was published using a mobile device that kicked in with auto-correct. The thoughts are, however, interesting enough that some obviously off-kilter words don't keep the idea from coming across. The Amish have cultivated a Christian culture that is robust and recognizable by not being in the culture around them. Neo-Calvinists, as yet, have not produced a culture that has become so recognizable or long-lasting and this "may" be because they haven't had time or, as Hart implies, they will always lack the foundation form which to build a "Christian culture" because the enterprise itself is dubious. Whether or not you agree with Hart on that is a matter all its own.
Having seen the earnestness with which some pastors in this area have said they want to win people to Jesus, people who will "move upstream" and "shape culture" I've also seen what can happen when people realize they are probably never going to move upstream and shape culture. They despair, they give up, they get resentful, and in some cases bail on church altogether. When a goal of Christian living is to "redeem culture" it may happen to happen but it ends up putting the cart before the horse.
I suppose I could write more on the matter but I don't feel like doing so.
Saturday, December 08, 2012
The Light's Home: a new ministry/counseling project spearheaded by James Noriega (former pastor at Mars Hill)
http://www.thelightshome.org/board-of-directors/.
As has been discussed at some length at this blog, James Noriega is no longer employed as a pastor by Mars Hill Church. He stopped being listed as a pastor approximately 12-14 months ago, back around September or October 2011. This is what he's been working on over the last year, for those who may be interested in reading about it. Here are a few testimonials with some names some of you regular readers may recognize.
http://www.thelightshome.org/testimonials/
Testimonials of note are from Andrew Pack (Anchor, a MH plant); Gary Shavey (MH Bellevue); AJ Hamilton (MH Albequerque); and Amanda Hightower.
As has been discussed at some length at this blog, James Noriega is no longer employed as a pastor by Mars Hill Church. He stopped being listed as a pastor approximately 12-14 months ago, back around September or October 2011. This is what he's been working on over the last year, for those who may be interested in reading about it. Here are a few testimonials with some names some of you regular readers may recognize.
http://www.thelightshome.org/testimonials/
Testimonials of note are from Andrew Pack (Anchor, a MH plant); Gary Shavey (MH Bellevue); AJ Hamilton (MH Albequerque); and Amanda Hightower.
Thursday, December 06, 2012
Star Trek Into Darkness ... okay
Something tells me this movie will not necessarily feature Spock doing battle against evil sentient flying pancakes that sound like squeaking doggy chew toys.
Mockingbird on Dave Brubeck and a few thoughts of my own
http://www.mbird.com/2012/12/to-hope-a-celebration-in-memory-of-dave-brubeck/
Earlier this year, when I wrote a guest piece for Internet Monk, I mused on how if in Christ there is no slave or free, Jew or Greek, or male or female then this meant that there is no high or low, art or pop, indie or mainstream but all are united in Christ who reconciles all things to God the Father through Himself. It's fitting to remember in the week of Brubeck's passing that he was Catholic (I'm Protestant but let's set aside a few of those ceaseless differences, significant though they are, to consider an element of Brubeck's legacy). Brubeck was catholic in his faith and musical interests and the cool sound he helped develop was a sound that fused "classical" with "jazz" in ways that were new and interesting.
I heard Brubeck twenty years ago and my musical thinking has never been the same since. What may be tedious or unappealing to many music listeners about Brubeck's music could well be summed up in "musical thinking". Brubeck was often a cerebral musician in how he came across, how he'd improvise an idea. There was, particularly for his detractors, something un-swinging and eggheaded about his musical approach. Even twenty years ago when I was introduced to his music I met people who said that Brubeck did not play jazz. About sixteen years ago the magazine Downbeat noted by that time Dave Brubeck constituted one of the pillars of mid-20th century jazz composers and pianists because, quite simply, he'd outlived pretty much all the jazz critics who refused to recognize his music as jazz. When all the dissenters have died off and you're still alive and kicking and touring and recording then, well, you kinda won that battle, didn't you?
Decades ago I wrote a little instrumental piece mainly in 5/8 that people thought I had written after hearing "Take Five" by the Brubeck Quartet. That piece is associated with Brubeck even though it was written by Desmond and when I wrote my 5/8 piece I had never even heard of Dave Brubeck or Paul Desmond. What I had heard was John Coltrane's "Afro Blue" and Tom Petty's "Breakdown". I liked both songs and wanted to come up with a song that was somewhere in between. So betweeen the buoyant 6/8 of Coltrane and the weirdly agitated lethargy of Tom Petty's four-on-the-floor I came up with a slightly astringent 5/8. Nobody at college who heard the instrumental believed I hadn't heard of Brubeck when I wrote the thing ... except for a friend of mine who was an old bandmate who says that the way I think about music the Coltrane/Tom Petty fusion into 5/8 totally makes sense.
Some twenty years on I'll happily say that Brubeck's music has been a touchstone for my way of thinking about composing and to some degree my musical goals. Theere's also Hindemith, Penederecki, Messiaen, Haydn, Bach, Stravinsky, Stevie Wonder ... but Brubeck was one of those seminal discoveries in which this guitarist and composer discovered a kind of fusion (and there are many kinds of fusion) that took hold of me.
Let me say something in defense of cerebral music. It is often said that music is a thing that speaks directly to the heart but it is taken for granted in a preponderance of tacitly dominant musical styles that something is understood and perceived by the mind to be actually be a musical style and an acceptable one before the "heart" has an emotional response. In the last one hundred and fifty years styles have exploded across and within regions. We live in the most polystylistic musical moment in the history of the entire human race. We live in an era in which the very idea of purity of style could be a quaint notion and it would be difficult to say there are any "rules" left to break except, perhaps, two sorts of rules: 1) the rules limiting what is possible with sound due to sheer physical limitations in tone production and human perception (though musical works exploiting infrasound are still feasible) and 2) limits in what is considered to be the barrier between Style A and Style B.
Brubeck was a musician who spent a lifetime crossing back and forth between what we might call Style A and Style B. He may not have always had equally effective and compelling moments in any of those two way stations, if you will, but that he was able to travel so freely and readily between those stations is itself an example for us to consider both now and in the future. We have lived through so many fractures and revolutions that the possibilities for moments and movements of consolidation and fusion may seem hard to imagine. Those moments were not hard for Dave Brubeck to imagine, he imagined them in all sorts of ways. It may be both too corny and too obvious to say that this enterprise of fusion and consolidation requires acting in faith and yet, as we know if we've listened to more than just a little Dave Brubedk he wasn't afraid to be either corny or obvious when he decided that it was musically worth doing.
Earlier this year, when I wrote a guest piece for Internet Monk, I mused on how if in Christ there is no slave or free, Jew or Greek, or male or female then this meant that there is no high or low, art or pop, indie or mainstream but all are united in Christ who reconciles all things to God the Father through Himself. It's fitting to remember in the week of Brubeck's passing that he was Catholic (I'm Protestant but let's set aside a few of those ceaseless differences, significant though they are, to consider an element of Brubeck's legacy). Brubeck was catholic in his faith and musical interests and the cool sound he helped develop was a sound that fused "classical" with "jazz" in ways that were new and interesting.
I heard Brubeck twenty years ago and my musical thinking has never been the same since. What may be tedious or unappealing to many music listeners about Brubeck's music could well be summed up in "musical thinking". Brubeck was often a cerebral musician in how he came across, how he'd improvise an idea. There was, particularly for his detractors, something un-swinging and eggheaded about his musical approach. Even twenty years ago when I was introduced to his music I met people who said that Brubeck did not play jazz. About sixteen years ago the magazine Downbeat noted by that time Dave Brubeck constituted one of the pillars of mid-20th century jazz composers and pianists because, quite simply, he'd outlived pretty much all the jazz critics who refused to recognize his music as jazz. When all the dissenters have died off and you're still alive and kicking and touring and recording then, well, you kinda won that battle, didn't you?
Decades ago I wrote a little instrumental piece mainly in 5/8 that people thought I had written after hearing "Take Five" by the Brubeck Quartet. That piece is associated with Brubeck even though it was written by Desmond and when I wrote my 5/8 piece I had never even heard of Dave Brubeck or Paul Desmond. What I had heard was John Coltrane's "Afro Blue" and Tom Petty's "Breakdown". I liked both songs and wanted to come up with a song that was somewhere in between. So betweeen the buoyant 6/8 of Coltrane and the weirdly agitated lethargy of Tom Petty's four-on-the-floor I came up with a slightly astringent 5/8. Nobody at college who heard the instrumental believed I hadn't heard of Brubeck when I wrote the thing ... except for a friend of mine who was an old bandmate who says that the way I think about music the Coltrane/Tom Petty fusion into 5/8 totally makes sense.
Some twenty years on I'll happily say that Brubeck's music has been a touchstone for my way of thinking about composing and to some degree my musical goals. Theere's also Hindemith, Penederecki, Messiaen, Haydn, Bach, Stravinsky, Stevie Wonder ... but Brubeck was one of those seminal discoveries in which this guitarist and composer discovered a kind of fusion (and there are many kinds of fusion) that took hold of me.
Let me say something in defense of cerebral music. It is often said that music is a thing that speaks directly to the heart but it is taken for granted in a preponderance of tacitly dominant musical styles that something is understood and perceived by the mind to be actually be a musical style and an acceptable one before the "heart" has an emotional response. In the last one hundred and fifty years styles have exploded across and within regions. We live in the most polystylistic musical moment in the history of the entire human race. We live in an era in which the very idea of purity of style could be a quaint notion and it would be difficult to say there are any "rules" left to break except, perhaps, two sorts of rules: 1) the rules limiting what is possible with sound due to sheer physical limitations in tone production and human perception (though musical works exploiting infrasound are still feasible) and 2) limits in what is considered to be the barrier between Style A and Style B.
Brubeck was a musician who spent a lifetime crossing back and forth between what we might call Style A and Style B. He may not have always had equally effective and compelling moments in any of those two way stations, if you will, but that he was able to travel so freely and readily between those stations is itself an example for us to consider both now and in the future. We have lived through so many fractures and revolutions that the possibilities for moments and movements of consolidation and fusion may seem hard to imagine. Those moments were not hard for Dave Brubeck to imagine, he imagined them in all sorts of ways. It may be both too corny and too obvious to say that this enterprise of fusion and consolidation requires acting in faith and yet, as we know if we've listened to more than just a little Dave Brubedk he wasn't afraid to be either corny or obvious when he decided that it was musically worth doing.
Wednesday, December 05, 2012
Dave Brubeck has died
I meant to write more than just noting the passing of the pianist and composer but life happens. Dave Brubeck died this morning at the age of 91. Perhaps I'll get around to blogging more about him, his music, and passing later. Today's just not turned out to be that day.
HT Mockingbird: The Humblebrag
http://www.mbird.com/2012/12/my-emails-send-so-slowly-from-cannes-social-media-and-the-art-of-humblebragging/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/fashion/bah-humblebrag-the-unfortunate-rise-of-false-humility.html?_r=0
There’s nothing new about false modesty, nor its designation as a form of bad manners. But the prevalence of social media has given us many more canvases on which to paint our faux humility — making us, in turn, increasingly sophisticated braggers.
... a humblebrag is an opportunity for the attention-starved to stake a claim on our sympathy.
The humblebrag, unsurprisingly, appears from people in ministry at megachurches. Despite having mentioned almost completely in passing about how his church was even able to rent the city of Ephesus for a day a nobody trying to tell everybody about somebody managed to tweet this.
Mark Driscoll@PastorMark 19 Jun 12
What do you call a guy expected to do what he cannot do with resources he does not have?
Pastor.
Could be a humblebrag, maybe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/fashion/bah-humblebrag-the-unfortunate-rise-of-false-humility.html?_r=0
There’s nothing new about false modesty, nor its designation as a form of bad manners. But the prevalence of social media has given us many more canvases on which to paint our faux humility — making us, in turn, increasingly sophisticated braggers.
... a humblebrag is an opportunity for the attention-starved to stake a claim on our sympathy.
Indeed, this may be why false modesty is no less discomfiting to its audience (and is sometimes more so) than outright bragging. Outright bragging expects to be met with awe, but humblebragging wants to met with awe and sympathy. It asks for two reactions from its audience, and in so doing makes fools of its beholders twice over. The practice is also ineffably irritating because it ultimately and slyly asserts the triumph of business over the personal: given that there’s a higher tolerance for bragging in business than social circles, many falsely modest statements on Twitter and Facebook try to fly under decorum’s radar by whispering to their readers, “You’re my fan, not my friend.”
The humblebrag, unsurprisingly, appears from people in ministry at megachurches. Despite having mentioned almost completely in passing about how his church was even able to rent the city of Ephesus for a day a nobody trying to tell everybody about somebody managed to tweet this.
Mark Driscoll@PastorMark 19 Jun 12
What do you call a guy expected to do what he cannot do with resources he does not have?
Pastor.
Could be a humblebrag, maybe.
Tuesday, December 04, 2012
Duo Rubicund, set of links to a Seattle flute and guitar duet
Er, they've been a flute and guitar duet up until about now. They're closing shop as the flutist is leaving town, if memory serves. But here's a bunch of links to stuff they've done. I'd encourage you to give their stuff a listen and check out some of their videos on YT.
Duo Rubicund
flutist Erica Coutsouridis and guitarist Meredith Connie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5yAIALIscw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkDmbF33EfE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1-DCaBErw
http://soundcloud.com/duorubicund/
I hear local Seattle guitarist Michael Partington has a new album out of works by Bryan Johanson. I also hear another Seattle guitarist, Hilary Field, has an album of viola and guitar music that should be officially released some time soon. As Wenatchee The Hatchet kinda tackles chamber music for classical guitar as a blogging topic from time to time you can anticipate that blogging about things like that will be a goal.
Some of you may have noticed there's more links and less lengthy blog posts and not as many of them. There are reasons for that. Sometimes life off-line keeps you busy in ways that are beneficial. I had thought about blogging about Skyfall and how it's sorta trippy that there's a James Bond movie that has a theme but I don't know if I'll necessarily do that now or not. I mean, the movie was out practically a whole month ago, wasn't it?
Duo Rubicund
flutist Erica Coutsouridis and guitarist Meredith Connie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5yAIALIscw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkDmbF33EfE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1-DCaBErw
http://soundcloud.com/duorubicund/
I hear local Seattle guitarist Michael Partington has a new album out of works by Bryan Johanson. I also hear another Seattle guitarist, Hilary Field, has an album of viola and guitar music that should be officially released some time soon. As Wenatchee The Hatchet kinda tackles chamber music for classical guitar as a blogging topic from time to time you can anticipate that blogging about things like that will be a goal.
Some of you may have noticed there's more links and less lengthy blog posts and not as many of them. There are reasons for that. Sometimes life off-line keeps you busy in ways that are beneficial. I had thought about blogging about Skyfall and how it's sorta trippy that there's a James Bond movie that has a theme but I don't know if I'll necessarily do that now or not. I mean, the movie was out practically a whole month ago, wasn't it?
PsyBlog: Why people believe weird things and 8 ways to change their minds
http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/12/why-people-believe-weird-things-and-8-ways-to-change-their-minds.php
...
People love sensational stories. They like to pass on tales that make the listener very happy, disgusted or afraid: anything that provokes a strong emotional response.
Neutral stories, which are probably more likely to be true, but much more boring, therefore get short shrift.
I've noticed this can happen on the internet from time to time. :) I could comment at greater length but it would not have any impact on those who might most benefit from such a discourse. ;)
...
People love sensational stories. They like to pass on tales that make the listener very happy, disgusted or afraid: anything that provokes a strong emotional response.
Neutral stories, which are probably more likely to be true, but much more boring, therefore get short shrift.
I've noticed this can happen on the internet from time to time. :) I could comment at greater length but it would not have any impact on those who might most benefit from such a discourse. ;)
Sunday, December 02, 2012
Doonan vents his spleen on the travesty of modern art, a travesty observed by Calvin & Hobbes 2 decades earlier
By all means read all of THIS link ...
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/doonan/2012/11/art_basel_why_i_m_not_going_hint_it_s_because_the_modern_art_world_is_the.single.html
before skipping to THIS link.
Bill Watterson was famous in the industry for his staunch views on artist rights and control over licensing and merchandising over against what his publisher wanted to do. Word has it that there's a documentary about Bill Watterson developing Calvin & Hobbes that's wrapping up, or should be, by late 2012 (according to a piece in Wired). If the movie wraps and gets a 2013 then that movie and not others will be the most anticipated film of 2013 for this blogger.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/doonan/2012/11/art_basel_why_i_m_not_going_hint_it_s_because_the_modern_art_world_is_the.single.html
before skipping to THIS link.
Bill Watterson was famous in the industry for his staunch views on artist rights and control over licensing and merchandising over against what his publisher wanted to do. Word has it that there's a documentary about Bill Watterson developing Calvin & Hobbes that's wrapping up, or should be, by late 2012 (according to a piece in Wired). If the movie wraps and gets a 2013 then that movie and not others will be the most anticipated film of 2013 for this blogger.
Saturday, December 01, 2012
Annette Kruisbrink: Dances 1, 2 and 3 for double bass and guitar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXgQm1dl0Iw&feature=related
Excerpts from Annette Kruisbrink's fantastive Five Dances for double bass and guitar.
Go find yourself the album Cirex by Kruisbrink where she plays her music for double bass and guitar with her brother. It's a fine album and Kruisbrink has composed what I consider to be the largest and most substantial body of chamber music for this pair of instruments. Time and resources permitting I'm hoping to do a detail analysis with linked Youtube video of Kruisbrink's fantastic and moody minimalist/fusion piece Cirex. :) I might have to keep that in store for Chamber Music Week 3 ... or 4.
Excerpts from Annette Kruisbrink's fantastive Five Dances for double bass and guitar.
Go find yourself the album Cirex by Kruisbrink where she plays her music for double bass and guitar with her brother. It's a fine album and Kruisbrink has composed what I consider to be the largest and most substantial body of chamber music for this pair of instruments. Time and resources permitting I'm hoping to do a detail analysis with linked Youtube video of Kruisbrink's fantastic and moody minimalist/fusion piece Cirex. :) I might have to keep that in store for Chamber Music Week 3 ... or 4.
duets for trombone and guitar are a bit rare but they do exist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4KbQTcmiUg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFjui_726Uc&list=UL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w28Ra-p2uFY&list=UL
Then there's Contrapunctus 14 for trombone and guitar. Yes, THAT Contrapunctus 14.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyU47OExGdQ&list=UL
They do a good job.
I have been working through sketches for a sonata for tenor and trombone for years and, well, shameless self-promotion here, if I were to contact an ensemble about that sonata when it's done these would be the folks I'd want to contact.
I've got some testing out of some things to do with my sonatas for guitar with trumpet and for guitar with tuba before I try tackling trombone, French horn and euphonium.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFjui_726Uc&list=UL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w28Ra-p2uFY&list=UL
Then there's Contrapunctus 14 for trombone and guitar. Yes, THAT Contrapunctus 14.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyU47OExGdQ&list=UL
They do a good job.
I have been working through sketches for a sonata for tenor and trombone for years and, well, shameless self-promotion here, if I were to contact an ensemble about that sonata when it's done these would be the folks I'd want to contact.
I've got some testing out of some things to do with my sonatas for guitar with trumpet and for guitar with tuba before I try tackling trombone, French horn and euphonium.
Friday, November 30, 2012
from the Carnival ... "The invisible women bishops of Phillipi"
http://dougchaplin.wordpress.com/2012/11/24/the-invisible-women-bishops-of-philippi/
If you saw the last post and remember that I read Jim West's blog and Scotteriology then you may have worked out what the Carnival is. Well, here's something from the latest Carnival.
A very lengthy quotation:
I’ve been pondering yesterday’s reading for St Clement. (For me it’s also tomorrow’s reading as I’m preaching at a transferred patronal festival.) It includes these verses from Philippians:
Thoughts? Invitations to comment at Wenatchee The Hatchet are invariably met with the endless throng of the singing of crickets across the cosmos. Maybe that's what we deserve for having disabled comments on some of the posts that were most likely to have inspired comments?
If you saw the last post and remember that I read Jim West's blog and Scotteriology then you may have worked out what the Carnival is. Well, here's something from the latest Carnival.
A very lengthy quotation:
I’ve been pondering yesterday’s reading for St Clement. (For me it’s also tomorrow’s reading as I’m preaching at a transferred patronal festival.) It includes these verses from Philippians:
I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life. (4:2-3 NRSV)Here, even more than in many places in Paul, it’s hard to reconstruct the details of the situation that is being taken for granted by Paul and his addressees. However, it seems to me that we can say the following.
- This touches on the main reasons for the letter. Paul’s appeal to Euodia and Syntyche echoes the language of his appeal in chapter 2 “to be of the same mind” which leads into the famous Christ-hymn.
- A personal disagreement between these two women seems to mirror, perhaps cause, a disagreement in the life of the church.
- Their position and their relationship is important enough for Paul to direct much of his argument towards healing it.
- There is no appeal to any other leader to solve the problem, knock heads together, etc, and there is noticeably no appeal to any man to exercise any authority over these women. Even Paul does not try to make his appeal one to authority, but one to friendship and mutual loyalty.
- The identity of the loyal companion Paul addresses is unknown. He is, however, a man asked to assist them. There is no male superiority assumed as a right.
- The women are equated with Clement (traditionally identified as the later bishop of Rome) and all Paul’s fellow-workers who have struggled with him in proclaiming the good news.
Thoughts? Invitations to comment at Wenatchee The Hatchet are invariably met with the endless throng of the singing of crickets across the cosmos. Maybe that's what we deserve for having disabled comments on some of the posts that were most likely to have inspired comments?
Theology and Music, 2 Samuel 18:33 as chant HT Jim West
http://meafar.blogspot.ca/2012/11/theology-and-music.html
I remember being surprised when I discovered the priest at the church in Patmos was also the choirmaster. He looked at me, a complete stranger, when I appeared at choir practice, introduced by the hotelier from Chicago, the owner of the hotel where we were staying on that small Greek island in the off-season, February 1997. And he said two words "maggiore, minore"? And I replied with major and minor thirds. I was younger then and I could sing them without wobbling. And he said - "You - sit here!" and directed me to a place beside him where I could receive instruction. I sat through the entire session, watching the others tape the whole rehearsal so they could learn it at home. The priest had not had someone there who could sing and hold the drone - so that was a good job for me, for I could neither read Greek nor read their strange chironomic notation above the text.
But there it is - all Orthodox priests have to be musicians. They continue the liturgical empire. Well - and so do the Anglicans. I have a couple of new projects starting - who knows how long they will take? But I have interested production staff, performers, composers, and arrangers here and all have now been introduced to the performing of the music of the Bible as deciphered by Suzanne Haik Vantoura.
There's quite a bit more but that's the teaser to get you to, I hope, follow the link.
I remember being surprised when I discovered the priest at the church in Patmos was also the choirmaster. He looked at me, a complete stranger, when I appeared at choir practice, introduced by the hotelier from Chicago, the owner of the hotel where we were staying on that small Greek island in the off-season, February 1997. And he said two words "maggiore, minore"? And I replied with major and minor thirds. I was younger then and I could sing them without wobbling. And he said - "You - sit here!" and directed me to a place beside him where I could receive instruction. I sat through the entire session, watching the others tape the whole rehearsal so they could learn it at home. The priest had not had someone there who could sing and hold the drone - so that was a good job for me, for I could neither read Greek nor read their strange chironomic notation above the text.
But there it is - all Orthodox priests have to be musicians. They continue the liturgical empire. Well - and so do the Anglicans. I have a couple of new projects starting - who knows how long they will take? But I have interested production staff, performers, composers, and arrangers here and all have now been introduced to the performing of the music of the Bible as deciphered by Suzanne Haik Vantoura.
There's quite a bit more but that's the teaser to get you to, I hope, follow the link.
any news about Nikita Koshkin's 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar?
I heard that Selyutina's been working on recording them and that Editions Margaux is the planned publisher but actual release date or publication date for recordings and scores has been a mystery. Obviously I'm keen to get both when they become available. Seeing as it's been a couple centuries since the Well-Tempered Clavier was put together for this kind of achievement to get tackled by a guitarist is unique.
Now while I can appreciate that some people believe that the whole idea of writing in every major and minor key for solo guitar no longer seems relevant in our age I would suggest the opposite may be the case. To the extent that a steady body of works in all major and minor keys has not had much traction in the guitar this gets to what some might call the question of an inferiority complex among guitarists as performers and composers.
In other words, to put things in polemical terms, if we never bothered to master musical expression and the development of musical ideas in all keys as happened for the keyboard then there's a sense in which moving along with modern styles is moving along in a way that doesn't mean the same thing it woudl for keyboard literature. Perhaps it's like jumping on a motorcycle without having ridden a bike. A guitarist can jump into the modern, anything-goes approach to music or skip over how sonata form and fugue are staples in the early keyboard literature and speak as though we just be happy with the literature we have; it may not be music that's necessarily as profound as the warhorses of keyboard or string literature but who wants to hear the clangy and loud piano?
Well, me for one. I enjoy Angela Hewitt's Bach recordings, for instance. I've got all the Beethoven sonatas. Is there some reason we guitarists should not compose in every possible key simply because Schoenberg showed up before Ponce wrote his sonatas? I don't see how that seems relevant at all. Let's say for the moment that the guitar was something Segovia wanted to elevate to the level of other instruments. Whether or not he succeeded could depend on the sort of repertoire that was available, right? How was that repertoire going to happen (if we eliminate Bach and Albeniz transcriptions) if guitarists as a group scrupulously avoided taking the comprehensive approach to keys that keyboardists tackled centuries ago?
So whether or not Koshkin's preludes and fugues for solo guitar end up being warhorses in the literature or if they become a curio "almost" doesn't matter. What I've heard so far is promising. Whether or not Koshkin uses true countersubjects or has dared to write a double fugue remains to be seen.
I've read some say that the fugue is a difficult form to tackle for the guitar because it can too often end up sounding like a scholastic exercise rather than real music. Perhaps we should say "real music" because people have stopped thinking and listening in contrapuntal terms as of longer-ago than pop music. Berlioz didn't always have the nicest things to say about Bach's work, for instance. Guitarists can, as a group, have an actually physical aversion to contrapuntal music. :) But I digress ... as usual.
Now while I can appreciate that some people believe that the whole idea of writing in every major and minor key for solo guitar no longer seems relevant in our age I would suggest the opposite may be the case. To the extent that a steady body of works in all major and minor keys has not had much traction in the guitar this gets to what some might call the question of an inferiority complex among guitarists as performers and composers.
In other words, to put things in polemical terms, if we never bothered to master musical expression and the development of musical ideas in all keys as happened for the keyboard then there's a sense in which moving along with modern styles is moving along in a way that doesn't mean the same thing it woudl for keyboard literature. Perhaps it's like jumping on a motorcycle without having ridden a bike. A guitarist can jump into the modern, anything-goes approach to music or skip over how sonata form and fugue are staples in the early keyboard literature and speak as though we just be happy with the literature we have; it may not be music that's necessarily as profound as the warhorses of keyboard or string literature but who wants to hear the clangy and loud piano?
Well, me for one. I enjoy Angela Hewitt's Bach recordings, for instance. I've got all the Beethoven sonatas. Is there some reason we guitarists should not compose in every possible key simply because Schoenberg showed up before Ponce wrote his sonatas? I don't see how that seems relevant at all. Let's say for the moment that the guitar was something Segovia wanted to elevate to the level of other instruments. Whether or not he succeeded could depend on the sort of repertoire that was available, right? How was that repertoire going to happen (if we eliminate Bach and Albeniz transcriptions) if guitarists as a group scrupulously avoided taking the comprehensive approach to keys that keyboardists tackled centuries ago?
So whether or not Koshkin's preludes and fugues for solo guitar end up being warhorses in the literature or if they become a curio "almost" doesn't matter. What I've heard so far is promising. Whether or not Koshkin uses true countersubjects or has dared to write a double fugue remains to be seen.
I've read some say that the fugue is a difficult form to tackle for the guitar because it can too often end up sounding like a scholastic exercise rather than real music. Perhaps we should say "real music" because people have stopped thinking and listening in contrapuntal terms as of longer-ago than pop music. Berlioz didn't always have the nicest things to say about Bach's work, for instance. Guitarists can, as a group, have an actually physical aversion to contrapuntal music. :) But I digress ... as usual.
Mere Orthodoxy and Rachel Held Evans
As complementarian/egalitarian interaction goes this is almost a unicorn.
http://www.mereorthodoxy.com/controversy-and-interpretation-biblical-womanhood/
http://www.mereorthodoxy.com/year-biblical-womanhood-review/
These are worth reading and the first because Evans has written that it is one of the first written responses from a complementarian to listen first and disagree in a respectful way.
Per an earlier post this week I think that blogging "merely" provides an opportunity for the presentation and discussion of ideas. In most cases this ends up being preaching to a choir at best or self-involved soap-boxing at worst. That's for "normal" blogging. But for not-normal blogging there is the sometime possibility that ideas and information can be presented and shared in a way that provides a newer level of informed assessment and decision-making.
http://www.mereorthodoxy.com/controversy-and-interpretation-biblical-womanhood/
http://www.mereorthodoxy.com/year-biblical-womanhood-review/
These are worth reading and the first because Evans has written that it is one of the first written responses from a complementarian to listen first and disagree in a respectful way.
Per an earlier post this week I think that blogging "merely" provides an opportunity for the presentation and discussion of ideas. In most cases this ends up being preaching to a choir at best or self-involved soap-boxing at worst. That's for "normal" blogging. But for not-normal blogging there is the sometime possibility that ideas and information can be presented and shared in a way that provides a newer level of informed assessment and decision-making.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Things I Think and things I think about blogging
http://michaelnewnham.com/?p=805
1. As I end yet another year of blogging , I’m amazed and discouraged at how right I was years ago and how little difference it makes. I knew the internet would become the new Wittenburg door, but I thought minor “reformations” would follow. Didn’t happen…if anything, things are worse in terms of ecclesiastical accountability.
I wasn't around Phoenix Preacher back when that observation was made, that I know of, but if the observation was that simply blogging about things would not change anything then I pretty much agree. Blogs set up to catalyze change can't accomplish much by themselves. People have to make decisions and take actions and blogs are almost by definition incapable of doing this merely as blogs.
However, as the blogging community of textual scholars and specialists in biblical and apocryphal literature showed earlier this year, there are things blogging can do. The irony may be that the little that blogs seem able to do may be the most important things they can do, inform.
So often blogs are about whatever the latest flash in the pan in blogland may be. It means that many blogs will have a proverbial fifteen minutes of fame and then those minutes will burn away with the next thing. Some blogs stick around for the long haul by being able to jump from wave to wave or making waves. In the blogs I read Rachel Held Evans gets discussed, though for precisely how long is nobody's guess. Evans could be around for years or decades depending on a host of things nobody can anticipate.
Helping people make informed decisions and assessments by getting them the best information you can is about the best (and maybe all) a blogger can do. Well, there's also encouraging and inviting discussion. This blog may not be the most wonderful blog about facilitating conversation because it deals with a lot of esoteric stuff and I admit the learning curve can be a little steep and unforgiving. It's not meant to alienate comment or conversation. I do admit that there are certain kinds of comments and conversations I tend to implicitly discourage but that'd be another post unto itself.
Not as active on the blog these days, obviously.
1. As I end yet another year of blogging , I’m amazed and discouraged at how right I was years ago and how little difference it makes. I knew the internet would become the new Wittenburg door, but I thought minor “reformations” would follow. Didn’t happen…if anything, things are worse in terms of ecclesiastical accountability.
I wasn't around Phoenix Preacher back when that observation was made, that I know of, but if the observation was that simply blogging about things would not change anything then I pretty much agree. Blogs set up to catalyze change can't accomplish much by themselves. People have to make decisions and take actions and blogs are almost by definition incapable of doing this merely as blogs.
However, as the blogging community of textual scholars and specialists in biblical and apocryphal literature showed earlier this year, there are things blogging can do. The irony may be that the little that blogs seem able to do may be the most important things they can do, inform.
So often blogs are about whatever the latest flash in the pan in blogland may be. It means that many blogs will have a proverbial fifteen minutes of fame and then those minutes will burn away with the next thing. Some blogs stick around for the long haul by being able to jump from wave to wave or making waves. In the blogs I read Rachel Held Evans gets discussed, though for precisely how long is nobody's guess. Evans could be around for years or decades depending on a host of things nobody can anticipate.
Helping people make informed decisions and assessments by getting them the best information you can is about the best (and maybe all) a blogger can do. Well, there's also encouraging and inviting discussion. This blog may not be the most wonderful blog about facilitating conversation because it deals with a lot of esoteric stuff and I admit the learning curve can be a little steep and unforgiving. It's not meant to alienate comment or conversation. I do admit that there are certain kinds of comments and conversations I tend to implicitly discourage but that'd be another post unto itself.
Not as active on the blog these days, obviously.
the feeling of never being out of the woods
Ever since I was young (as in substantially younger than I am now) I tended to think of myself as a bit of a fuddy duddy. I wouldn't have said I was an "old soul" because I didn't exactly think I was wise beyond my years and there's that proverb about how you should let another praise you and not yourself. The phrase I preferred to think of applying to me was (and is) "old at heart" in both bad and good senses of that term. In the good sense, for me, I found it easier in my teens to relate to and converse with people older than me. Call it an interest in transforming any potential relationship with someone older, male or female, into at least a possibility for apprenticing in life.
In the bad sense ... well ... perhaps it would be in the form of a kind of pessimism ... .
Maybe pessimism isn't quite strong enough a word, actually. A friend of mine has joked that if he's like Superman I'm like Batman. He likes to see the positive side of things and how people are basically good and can be trusted. Me ... heh heh ... you may have already begun to see the comparison work itself out. But I'll proceed anyway. I tend to have a grim view of human nature. We are not so smart and we are often dumbest when we are sure we're brilliant. We are not as rational as we think we are in our most "rational" moments.
There are things in life where how things work out can seem to be the opposite of what might be implied. I've joked that Arminians emphasize how free we are as individuals in the ordo salutis but they can be emphatic about the need to find God's best will if you've grown up in Wesleyan settings of any stripe (let alone a Pentecostal/charismatic scene were working out your divine destiny/spiritual gift/place can be obsessive. Calvinists, notoriously, posit that you can't possibly choose God of your own accord and that the Lord must intervene on your behalf for you to even make a choice. Yet many Calvinists go through life blissfully unconcerned about what, exactly, God might want them to do. So long as it's not something expressly forbidden in the Bible and you want to do it, don't bother working out whether or not you "should" do it. If it works, great, if not, well, that happens.
By extension a counterintuitive application of my kinda gloomy view of the human condition is a desire to give individuals the benefit of a doubt. Maybe I'm wrong about something and maybe this other person knows all kinds of stuff I don't. One of my siblings described this disposition in contrast to people who are optimistic and trusting about people but become withdrawn and upset when hurt or disappointed. This optimistic sort could be described as a sensitive optimist, where as the sibling and I could be described as "friendly pessimists". We have a view of the human condition generally that can be grim ... but since you're here and all that's no reason we can't get to know each other. As I put it to a friend years ago, I tend to anticipate the worst so that when the worst doesn't happen I can be pleasantly surprised. The friend said he always assumed the best whether for outcomes or expectations of people and that this was why he would get so morally outraged over his disappointment. Moral outrage is the sort of thing that falters the more a boy cries wolf so I'm not usually eager to get angry about people. THings ... I can have a bad temper about.
Well, part of this disposition is a feeling that you're never really out of the woods. The trees may have thinned enough that you can see a prarie or a lake. You might even come to the lake but you're technically still not out of the woods. Even in my teens and twenties the inevitably of death was not something I was able to put out of mind for long. Life is short and fragile. I had ambitions and dreams and so on like many a teenager would but in my teens the spectre of End Times stuff meant that any ideas for a lasting legacy were mooted by End Times stuff. I may have cast off dispensationalist futurism in my mind but perhaps at some emotional level the feeling that everything a person says or does can get swept away into nothingness by the end of life on earth can stick with you even when you don't necesarily want it that way.
I've had a rough few years, possibly some of the worst years I've had. I don't stop considering, from time to time, that things can still get worse and that death could be around the corner. In the setting I used to be in I heard a lot, and I mean a lot, about people building legacies. From someone who went through Ecclesiastes about three times the emphasis on legacy seems weird because Ecclesiastes goes on at some length about how death destroys legacies overnight and names are forgotten in scarcely two generations, maybe even within the generation itself. But adventures in Ecclesiastes is for some other time.
In the bad sense ... well ... perhaps it would be in the form of a kind of pessimism ... .
Maybe pessimism isn't quite strong enough a word, actually. A friend of mine has joked that if he's like Superman I'm like Batman. He likes to see the positive side of things and how people are basically good and can be trusted. Me ... heh heh ... you may have already begun to see the comparison work itself out. But I'll proceed anyway. I tend to have a grim view of human nature. We are not so smart and we are often dumbest when we are sure we're brilliant. We are not as rational as we think we are in our most "rational" moments.
There are things in life where how things work out can seem to be the opposite of what might be implied. I've joked that Arminians emphasize how free we are as individuals in the ordo salutis but they can be emphatic about the need to find God's best will if you've grown up in Wesleyan settings of any stripe (let alone a Pentecostal/charismatic scene were working out your divine destiny/spiritual gift/place can be obsessive. Calvinists, notoriously, posit that you can't possibly choose God of your own accord and that the Lord must intervene on your behalf for you to even make a choice. Yet many Calvinists go through life blissfully unconcerned about what, exactly, God might want them to do. So long as it's not something expressly forbidden in the Bible and you want to do it, don't bother working out whether or not you "should" do it. If it works, great, if not, well, that happens.
By extension a counterintuitive application of my kinda gloomy view of the human condition is a desire to give individuals the benefit of a doubt. Maybe I'm wrong about something and maybe this other person knows all kinds of stuff I don't. One of my siblings described this disposition in contrast to people who are optimistic and trusting about people but become withdrawn and upset when hurt or disappointed. This optimistic sort could be described as a sensitive optimist, where as the sibling and I could be described as "friendly pessimists". We have a view of the human condition generally that can be grim ... but since you're here and all that's no reason we can't get to know each other. As I put it to a friend years ago, I tend to anticipate the worst so that when the worst doesn't happen I can be pleasantly surprised. The friend said he always assumed the best whether for outcomes or expectations of people and that this was why he would get so morally outraged over his disappointment. Moral outrage is the sort of thing that falters the more a boy cries wolf so I'm not usually eager to get angry about people. THings ... I can have a bad temper about.
Well, part of this disposition is a feeling that you're never really out of the woods. The trees may have thinned enough that you can see a prarie or a lake. You might even come to the lake but you're technically still not out of the woods. Even in my teens and twenties the inevitably of death was not something I was able to put out of mind for long. Life is short and fragile. I had ambitions and dreams and so on like many a teenager would but in my teens the spectre of End Times stuff meant that any ideas for a lasting legacy were mooted by End Times stuff. I may have cast off dispensationalist futurism in my mind but perhaps at some emotional level the feeling that everything a person says or does can get swept away into nothingness by the end of life on earth can stick with you even when you don't necesarily want it that way.
I've had a rough few years, possibly some of the worst years I've had. I don't stop considering, from time to time, that things can still get worse and that death could be around the corner. In the setting I used to be in I heard a lot, and I mean a lot, about people building legacies. From someone who went through Ecclesiastes about three times the emphasis on legacy seems weird because Ecclesiastes goes on at some length about how death destroys legacies overnight and names are forgotten in scarcely two generations, maybe even within the generation itself. But adventures in Ecclesiastes is for some other time.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
and another HT to Jim West: JEsus and the Jehovah's Witnesses cartoon
http://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/jesus-and-the-jehovahs-witnesses/
Let's just say you don't really have to be able to read German to get this one.
Let's just say you don't really have to be able to read German to get this one.
Jim West makes a passionate case against X-mas and gets into the Greek alphabet
http://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/the-letter-x-is-never-used-in-the-nomina-sacra-please-dont-say-it-is-and-dont-say-its-a-proper-replacement-for-christmas/
... X (the English letter) is not equal to Χ (the Greek letter). Ξ is. Further, really, how many people know the Greek letter Χ and use it, and know that they’re using it in reference to Christ? Finally, the abbreviation for χριστος in the nomina sacra is χρ with the line above, never, to my recollection, is it simply χ (though I’m happy to be shown the error of my ways if someone can provide an example). ...
As Christian bloggers go this would be the part where we nod thoughtfully and discuss how irenic West's post was. After all, that's what you're supposed to do in the Christian blogosphere, right? ;-)
... X (the English letter) is not equal to Χ (the Greek letter). Ξ is. Further, really, how many people know the Greek letter Χ and use it, and know that they’re using it in reference to Christ? Finally, the abbreviation for χριστος in the nomina sacra is χρ with the line above, never, to my recollection, is it simply χ (though I’m happy to be shown the error of my ways if someone can provide an example). ...
As Christian bloggers go this would be the part where we nod thoughtfully and discuss how irenic West's post was. After all, that's what you're supposed to do in the Christian blogosphere, right? ;-)
Monday, November 26, 2012
a riddle--what do Miles Davis and Jackie Chan have in common?
a puzzle for consideration. :) Post answers if you wish.
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