http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2015/01/the-problem-with-men-and-why-we-ignore-itthem-at-our-own-risk/
... I am no expert on gender matters, but I’ve read a lot of the literature that exists and I’m not convinced by most of it. Oh, of course, there’s some truth in most of it, but I don’t think the experts have, by-and-large, hit on the right causes or solutions. But I admit that my own thoughts about this are based largely on my own observations of boys and men over six to seven decades of life. I consider myself a fairly keen observer of people’s behavior and not particularly bad when it comes to deducing their causes and concluding about some workable solutions.
I suspect, in fact I believe, that human males crave respect. For most males, boys and men, respect is somewhere near the top of their hierarchy of needs. I would go so far as to say that, if they were to be completely honest, when asked which they would prefer if they had to choose one over the other most males would take respect over love. And, perhaps unfortunately, part of that craving for respect is desiring to be respected for their maleness.
Well, respectfully, Wenatchee The Hatchet disputes this particular point. People in general like to be respected but that's not exactly the nature of the concern I'm about to put forth.
It's not enough for males to get respect, the respect has to be something the recipient can reasonably perceive has been earned. There may be guys who want respect "just" because they're males but a lot of guys, if they want respect, they want that respect to reflect on their character and productivity.
Roy Baumeister, in his book Is There Anything Good About Men?, put it this way--male social structures tend to make it so that any one male is ultimately superfluous to the life of the organization or movement. A corporation will tend to survive (if it's going to, anyway) whether or not any one person is part of the corporation. Baumeister also noted that pretty much the world over the rite of passage from boyhood to manhood has tended to be when a male produces more than he consumes. Whenever and however he crosses that threshold the boy becomes a man. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, rites of passage could tend to involve activities in which productive activity play some role. Hunting for food, cultivating a crop, mastering a trade, whatever it may be, the boy becomes a man when he is able to not just consume but produce more than he consumes, and in more traditional/parochial societies that could be construed as enough "more" to feed a wife and children.
Baumeister went a bit further, though, in proposing that the essential trait of masculinity is that males are disposable and that it is this disposability of the male that makes their contributions to culture paramount. Males have historically embraced the high risk/high payoff activities that advance civilizations, while the energy and activity of motherhood was so intensive cultures generally refused to put women at the kinds of risks that men were not only put to, but often actively sought out.
That might be like saying that guys want respect but they want it by virtue of having proven they're useful and needed. While social systems in which everyone is considered essential and has a role to play apply across the board, if Baumeister's right, his proposal would be that guys tend to create teams in which you first have to prove you're worthy of being on the team and then once you've done that then you get respect. Olson's proposals seem rather generic and unhelpful because while it may be the average male craves respect the average male might also not like respect that he feels has simply been given to him because it's what everybody else is getting. Maybe guys compete because they want a pecking order and want a basis from which to understand social rankings. It doesn't matter how progressive or egalitarian humans may try to be, it seems we fall back on hierarchies of status and pecking orders.
There's been a lot of Christians talking about a crisis in masculinity but what, exactly, is this crisis? That guys aren't rising to the challenge of adulthood in contemporary society? Let's reframe the nature of the question, what is it that's worth rising to these days? Family? Career? Education? These are all positive things but perhaps the cart has been put before the horse because in many societies a lot of these things were decided for you rather than by you.
Take songs from the 18th century like a jovial number by Haydn, it's a song about this guy who creeps up to visit a beautiful girl cloistered in a nunnery and for the labor of climbing the walls to visit her he asks to be rewarded by her with a kiss. Haydn himself was nearly turned into a castrato, if memory serves, and he was never able to marry the woman he was crushing on because of class barriers. What may be different in our age is that there's an elephant in the room, and it may be the real nature of the "crisis" Christians talk about when they talk about a crisis in masculinity.
In social science terms the phrase would be "sexual market value", how viable on the market for mating a person is or isn't. It may be the crisis in masculinity is not that a whole bunch of guys aren't getting married and getting jobs and starting families already, the crisis may be that in a post-modern information age it's easier than ever for males to realize how disposable they actually are. When this crosses their mind they may just "opt out" of what has traditionally been called functional adulthood and not because none of them ever want that but because the risk to reward equation may seem stacked against them. It may just be that for American Christians there's no practical teaching of any value for how to live a Christian life when a person's "sexual market value" is zero other than "well ... get married already." It can seem as though functional adulthood is so thoroughly defined by sexual activity (since, well, we're all mammals here, right?) that the idea that one size does not fit all has been lost.
A lot has been said about Mark Driscoll over the years but there were some things he understood and even did right, at least early on. Driscoll used to say that guys need something to do to motivate them. You can't just confer "respect" on guys and have them buy it. They have to get the sense that the respect they get is respect they've earned. If you get guys together and tell them there's something you want done, something that can't be done without them, and then give them the agency to go do that thing then you've gotten the young guys. The way Driscoll did it was pretty simple, really, he promised a legacy. Had the legacy that Mark Driscoll invited young guys to participate in and contribute to remained a shared legacy rather than what increasingly seemed to be the personal legacy of Mark Driscoll there might still be a Mars Hill today. Be that as it may, it's worth suggesting in light of Roger Olson's recent post that while his diagnosis and proposed solution seems nebulous and even lacking, it's kind of a reminder that at one point Driscoll had this nailed down. He did know how to appeal to and motivate young guys who had previously no investment in "growing up".
But if we're going to get guys inspired by giving them something to do what would that be? That is probably the insoluable conundrum within American culture. Unlike earlier times and places we don't really have a set of options that people could take up when they were deemed not-marriage material. In the past someone who was at the end of the line for inheritance had to make their own way and if they couldn't they might end up in an army or in a monastery. We don't exactly have those equivalents in the same way. Rather than even discuss that plenty of people are not marriage/family-building material Christians in particular seem to want all able-bodied or even semi-bodied males to "man up". One of the numerous shortfalls in Real Marriage was Driscoll opining that some guys didn't trust God enough to provide for children and thus sinfully resisted their wives wanting to have babies.
But if Driscoll has retained any fondness for Bonhoeffer he might have recalled that Bonhoeffer wrote that while abortion was always wrong it might still be more moral to refrain from bringing children into the world you couldn't properly support than to just have them anyway. Driscoll simultaneously set the bar too high by defining functional adulthood in terms of nuclear family building and yet also too low in the sense that he went so far as to propose that the reason God gave men a huge sex drive was so that that sex drive could spur a boy to become a man and take a wife. As has been discussed at some length here before, same sex attraction obliterates the viability of Driscoll's own taxonomy of manhood on its own terms, given Driscoll's stance on gays.
So ... even with that in mind, it seems that Mark Driscoll's success was in inspiring young guys in the sorts of ways that those who talk about a crisis in masculinity have kept coming back to.
At the moment with Driscoll in some kind of stasis sounding off on the crisis of contemporary males is going to be asking a question that probably isn't that contemporary. The book of Proverbs was advising against joining gangs of worthless young rascals millennia ago. And it seems that the real crisis American Christians may be facing is that as the nuclear family becomes less and less economically viable tethering all the "practical teaching" to that ideal may reveal the limitations of the "Law" of family as economic realities shift. For American conservative Protestants it may just be that marriage is the new circumcision and not surprisingly, focusing on the necessity of marriage in other ways may be a progressive Christian concern, too.
It kind of seems that whether it's a Christian left or right the idea that there's no place for eunuchs, and if we go by Jesus' words on the subject two of three categories of eunuchs didn't pick that status. And let's not kid ourselves too much, in most times and places the mating game has been a status game. What if in the age to come the absence of marriage or being given in marriage might have something to do with that, something to do with status indicators in ancient societies that we find hard to appreciate because we've got a romantic sentimental notion that "there's someone for everyone" when in possibly any and every earlier epoch of humanity people may have known better than that?
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
Monday, February 02, 2015
a statement from James Harleman at Repentant Pastor--some observations about how the water boiled and why 2007 was in one sense symbolic rather than substantial
http://repentantpastor.com/confessions/james-harlemans-confession/
The above went up Saturday morning and Wenatchee The Hatchet has waited a bit to discuss the content.
It took a few years longer than hoped for, but it is nice to see the statement.
Regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet should already know that one of the long-term contentions here has been that identity politics as usual made it impossible for the theological "left" and "right" to get an accurate or even honest understanding of what was at play in the history of Mars Hill and in the public/private ministry of Mark Driscoll. While for a time Driscoll and his advocates had mastery over the public narrative both for and against him, the level of control possible over that narrative eroded over time. This doesn't mean that there aren't people who have jumped up to talk about the "lessons" we can or should all learn from the demise of Mars Hill; there have been plenty of those and the problem has been that most of those people have thrown lessons our way that seem like exercises in self-justification. As Wenatchee has written more and less obliquely in the last year, if the "lessons" you have to share with the world about Mars Hill are lessons that exonerate you then, well, you probably learned nothing.
Which is why Harleman's statement was encouraging to read. For those unfamiliar with his work or his writing "I was Jar Jar Binks" is a pretty concise and hefty admission of guilt.
You can go read the statement if you haven't already. This post will be ruminating about a few things touched on in James' statement that bear further thought.
It has been necessary for someone who was in the leadership culture of Mars Hill to observe, no, let's say it is helpful that someone has observed that what happened in 2007 was surely important but that it was, in many ways, symbolically important. How Mark and other leaders spoke to and treated people before and after was not necessarily any better. Some might say that up until 2007 there was at least the formal possibility of Driscoll being held accountable. That's ultimately nonsense since 1) we know the elders did not hold Driscoll accountable and 2) that would be, as James put it in his statement, belittling to those who were mistreated before 2007. James would know where some of the proverbial bodies got buried. We hail from early enough in the history of Mars Hill we can remember a few things that went down that people who showed up even as early as 2002 or 2003 couldn't have known about.
There was a lot that happened that happened in plain sight. Those who remember Driscoll saying to a guy "Shut your wife up or I'll do it for you" may not remember it was in the context of a discussion about the film Lost in Translation. They may remember the topic in discussion was whether men and women could have close friends of the opposite gender. There were people who would go on to be Driscoll critics who at the time concluded that the woman Driscoll put in the place he thought she needed to be just had issues with spiritual authority. Because Real Marriage had not been published and the Driscolls had not revealed how rickety their marriage truly was a lot of people could just trust that even if Driscoll was too harsh it was still for a good reason.
James' statement gets at some of the general process of how rationalizing that the positive fruit outweighed the negative fruit looked in a slice of the church history.
It is true that 2007 was a landmark year in the history of the church but Wenatchee The Hatchet is going to propose that it was not because the change of the by-laws necessarily became a point of no return. That Driscoll was left in ministry in the wake of 2000's "Pussified Nation" would seem to have settled further back that leaving Driscoll in ministry might have been a bad move. But by the time many former pillars in the community showed up circa 2000-2002 "Pussified Nation" had been thoroughly scrubbed. There were men who served as pastors who never even heard of the thread, let alone saw it. In the years before 2007 there had been things that could have been scandalous but things were able to be suppressed quickly enough that things died down. That Driscoll could be verbally abusive and bullying wasn't news by 2007. As Dan Savage so bluntly put it, there were a lot of guys in leadership at the formal and informal level in Mars Hill who only concluded Mark Driscoll was a nasty piece of work when they were directly harmed by Driscoll's action. For Savage that made each and every one such man a complicit asshole.
Which is why reading James articulate that the strictly binary script the for and against crews have brought to bear on the history of Mars Hill is encouraging to see. When Wenatchee The Hatchet felt obliged to leave Mars Hill a parting concern was to observe that I can't diagnose a spiritual ailment in the community of Mars Hill without acknowledging that I am also a symptom. Those who diagnose a disease without seeing themselves as a symptom may not yet understand their contribution to the spiritual and social malaise.
That said, to get back to the earlier observation about 2007, what made things different was that by 2007 the php discussion boards made cross-campus communication and enquiry so swift and so simple that the kind of information suppressing damage control that might have worked wonderfully in the past was no longer possible. The by-laws changes and the firings did not happen in a vacuum, either. Questions had emerged about the $1.5 million boondoggle that was supposed to be Ballard campus II. It would be a huge mistake to fixate on the bylaws as indicative of a serious change for the worse within the leadership of Mars Hill because there was a unified vote for that 2005 boondoggle. Frankly the fiscal foolishness of that 2005 decision, when the details finally started to belatedly get conceded, was more infuriating than the secrecy surrounding the 2007 firings. Why? Because even the fired pastors voted for that real estate purchase.
What James Harleman's statement touches upon is that the water was coming to a boil for years before 2007. Anyone who was at Mars Hill circa 2002-2007 may recall the courtship fad and it was one of the more idiotic fads in the history of the church. Wenatchee The Hatchet's disdain for the fad would be easily known to those who know who Wenatchee The Hatchet is. It's one thing to urge people to respectfully pursue marriage in a way that respects the concerns of all concerned parties, and another to present courtship as the "Christian" alternative to modern dating practices. There's no methodology that is fire insurance against the temptation to evil in your own heart. And yet there was a weird lockstep enforcement of the story of how great courtship was. What did it matter that one of the textbook/poster couple courtships didn't exactly fit the mold? The mold was more important than the reality.
In terms of cultural enforcement there was a sense in which a culture that would enforce the silly legalisms of the courtship fad could be relied upon to enforce draconian expectations when actually important things, like governance and finances came up. Harleman's statement touches on these things but they seem worth mentioning explicitly. There were a whole lot of people who went on to be Driscoll critics who played roles in enforcing the expectations and rules formal and informal in the culture. The point here, muddled though it is, is that 2007 was symbolically important and meant a big change in formal governance but the crisis only emerged when people who were in some sense expected to keep operating by the informal script broke from their script.
What was different in 2007 was that by 2007 Mars Hill had cultivated information distribution, social media and mass media tools of the sort that made fully suppressing scandals nearly impossible. It wasn't possible, any longer, to just scrub a "Pussified Nation" away and hope nobody noticed. Ironically and yet inevitably the strengths of Mars Hill became weaknesses, the information distribution culture that had been cultivated within Mars Hill became a means of articulating the beginnings of some dissent. The php forums were swiftly scrapped and replaced with The City. As Wenatchee The Hatchet has demonstrated vividly in more than a dozen posts, even The City eventually became a point from which members expressing dissent began to leak content. Or as an old-time Mars Hill song could have put it "Strength is my weakness." When it became impossible to suppress the rumbling of discord the leadership culture had to seize control of the narrative in a forceful way, which is pretty much what happened. What James Harleman has opened up is a glimpse into how even the process of the leadership selling itself on the plausibility of what was done planted the seeds of what grew into a crisis.
The majority of readers last year probably wouldn't know Wenatchee The Hatchet has known James for at least fifteen years now. Our friendship was probably not something anyone with ten years inside MH wouldn't already know about. There's a whole lot of blogging about cartoons that wouldn't have happened the way it did without the two of us sharing many a thought about animation and about superheroes. A write-up about his book is still pending.
But in a way what James has shared about reconsidering the narrative of his life and his time at Mars Hill is an example of what he's done for years. He spent many a Friday evening over the years discussing narrative in film and ways we can analyze narrative and character arcs to discover what is or isn't true about the human condition and connect it to what he's called the meganarrative. So in many ways what James published this last weekend fits into all of that.
Others have pointed out that what happened in the last few years was that Mark Driscoll and his advocates lost control of the public narrative. That would be accurate. It might be even more accurate to add to that observation that what transpired was the narrative that had always been public was finally able to get examined with enough primary source citation and, not to put this pejoratively, critical apparatus to reveal that the public narrative had changed in ways that were drastic enough to cast legitimate doubt on its overall veracity. Driscoll was starting to contradict his own public narrative at too many points about too many big events in the story for the public narrative to remain coherent. The tipping point there was, in many ways, Real Marriage. What James Harleman's latest statement gives us at least a glimpse of is that there were people within the leadership of Mars Hill who had moments of doubt about what was going on and how they persuaded themselves things were okay, at least for a while.
This rationalization process would be easy to condemn if it weren't seeming so awkwardly evident lately that it doesn't matter what team you're on, this process of overlooking the bad because you think it's outweighed by the good can happen anywhere. It remains to be seen how things will play out regarding Tony Jones and Julie McMahon but we don't even need to look at the realm of religion. What about Penn State and Joe Paterno? Even without religious ideas at stake if there's enough money and power in play overlooking or dismissing allegations of severe wrong-doing can still happen.
Wenatchee The Hatchet admits to being a bit gloomy about the human condition. One of the laziest canards from people who seem to imagine themselves above this sort of thing would be the "lol don't drink the kool-aid" sentiment, as if humans had a capacity to inherently resist drinking kool-aid. What if drinking the kool-aid is actually inherent in what humans do? Think about it this way, what are the great works of art and philosophy if not, at the end of things, definitions and defenses of what would be worth "drinking the kool-aid" for? Take Driscoll's one-time favorite film Braveheart. What's worth killing and dying for? Freedom ... theoretically. But having never much cared for Braveheart compared to Toy Story Wenatchee The Hatchet will borrow some phrases from the buddies at Mockingbird and say that the problem with the Gibson film is that in the end it was not really a rumination on freedom as much as a rumination on the glory of fighting for freedom. Call it a theology of glory rather than theology of freedom if we're even going to "go there" in discussing the film as any theology of any kind. Certainly in the hands of a Mark Driscoll, with his career-long drive toward "legacy", it would be almost impossible not to think of that push for legacy as tinged, at least, with a theology of glory.
And this gets roundaboutly to something else Harleman touches on, that there were men in leadership who could not raise doubts about Mark Driscoll without ultimately raising doubts about their own fitness for ministry. There were men who only ended up in ministry at Mars Hill because Mark Driscoll recruited them. It could have been guys like Petry and Meyer, in fact, recruited into ministry, who ended up fired when they didn't go on script about governance. Take a group of men who ended up in ministry because they were recruited by Mark or men who came to or back to the Christian faith on account of Mars Hill and questioning Mark became too self-indicting to be emotionally sustainable.
This gets to a point that Wenatchee The Hatchet has presented before, that it's important to understand that many people over the years who have defended the situation at Mars Hill were ultimately not defending Mark Driscoll, necessarily, as they were defending themselves. People were defending their own emotional investment of their selves into what became Mars Hill. Wenatchee The Hatchet used to make defenses of how Mars Hill did things but not generally of Mark Driscoll the person, who often enough said stuff so stupid there was no point in defending that stuff. Over time Wenatchee began to realize that a defense of a conventionally evangelical Protestant, let alone Reformed, Christian confession was not only not going to benefit from any defense of Driscoll but that Mark Driscoll began to seem more and more like a RINO, Reformed-in-name-only. At length he tipped his Amyraldian hand. But by the time he did there was this problem, so many journalists and writers, even those who supposedly knew what they were talking about, had already labeled Mark Driscoll as Reformed. Even among Mark Driscoll's critics, the price of backpedaling on the narrative was too high. And it turned out to be the same for many of Mark Driscoll's supporters.
The term repentance can be easily wielded by Christians. In a setting like Mars Hill it tended to refer to either behaviors or doctrines. What beliefs needed to change? What behaviors needed to change? But there's something in addition to that that defines what repentance is in Christian terms, it's recalibrating and redefining the story we live by. When we find our story meets the story of who Christ is and what he said and did our story changes ... and it has begun to seem more and more over the years that at Mars Hill we were told "It's all about Jesus" and it began to seem as though, as more than just a few people tried to point out, that Jesus seemed to be someone remade more and more into Mark's ideal of who Jesus ought to be than the one presented in the scriptures.
Understanding that following Christ hardly entailed remaining at Mars Hill and that Mars Hill was hardly the only place (if that) in which to follow Jesus was a years-long process for Wenatchee The Hatchet. Repenting from being the kind of Christian I was while I was there isn't even a finished process and to the extent that this blog has preserved the story of Mars Hill it could be read as a form of repentance. I've never told anyone they "have" to leave Mars Hill but I've invited them to reconsider the narrative. That's a path that people may not choose to take but for those who do, it's probably a never-ending path. If anything the most dangerous thing for us would be to think we've "arrived" because, after all, wasn't that how we felt when we landed at Mars Hill?
To piggyback a bit on what James published this weekend, a more thoroughly Christian understanding of the world we live in should neither make us a hero or even a villain in the story of our lives. One of the most pernicious temptations for those who would either defend or attack what has happened within what was once known as Mars Hill is to make ourselves the hero in the narrative. If we did that while we were there let's all the more resist the temptation to do that when we are away.
The above went up Saturday morning and Wenatchee The Hatchet has waited a bit to discuss the content.
It took a few years longer than hoped for, but it is nice to see the statement.
Regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet should already know that one of the long-term contentions here has been that identity politics as usual made it impossible for the theological "left" and "right" to get an accurate or even honest understanding of what was at play in the history of Mars Hill and in the public/private ministry of Mark Driscoll. While for a time Driscoll and his advocates had mastery over the public narrative both for and against him, the level of control possible over that narrative eroded over time. This doesn't mean that there aren't people who have jumped up to talk about the "lessons" we can or should all learn from the demise of Mars Hill; there have been plenty of those and the problem has been that most of those people have thrown lessons our way that seem like exercises in self-justification. As Wenatchee has written more and less obliquely in the last year, if the "lessons" you have to share with the world about Mars Hill are lessons that exonerate you then, well, you probably learned nothing.
Which is why Harleman's statement was encouraging to read. For those unfamiliar with his work or his writing "I was Jar Jar Binks" is a pretty concise and hefty admission of guilt.
You can go read the statement if you haven't already. This post will be ruminating about a few things touched on in James' statement that bear further thought.
It has been necessary for someone who was in the leadership culture of Mars Hill to observe, no, let's say it is helpful that someone has observed that what happened in 2007 was surely important but that it was, in many ways, symbolically important. How Mark and other leaders spoke to and treated people before and after was not necessarily any better. Some might say that up until 2007 there was at least the formal possibility of Driscoll being held accountable. That's ultimately nonsense since 1) we know the elders did not hold Driscoll accountable and 2) that would be, as James put it in his statement, belittling to those who were mistreated before 2007. James would know where some of the proverbial bodies got buried. We hail from early enough in the history of Mars Hill we can remember a few things that went down that people who showed up even as early as 2002 or 2003 couldn't have known about.
There was a lot that happened that happened in plain sight. Those who remember Driscoll saying to a guy "Shut your wife up or I'll do it for you" may not remember it was in the context of a discussion about the film Lost in Translation. They may remember the topic in discussion was whether men and women could have close friends of the opposite gender. There were people who would go on to be Driscoll critics who at the time concluded that the woman Driscoll put in the place he thought she needed to be just had issues with spiritual authority. Because Real Marriage had not been published and the Driscolls had not revealed how rickety their marriage truly was a lot of people could just trust that even if Driscoll was too harsh it was still for a good reason.
James' statement gets at some of the general process of how rationalizing that the positive fruit outweighed the negative fruit looked in a slice of the church history.
It is true that 2007 was a landmark year in the history of the church but Wenatchee The Hatchet is going to propose that it was not because the change of the by-laws necessarily became a point of no return. That Driscoll was left in ministry in the wake of 2000's "Pussified Nation" would seem to have settled further back that leaving Driscoll in ministry might have been a bad move. But by the time many former pillars in the community showed up circa 2000-2002 "Pussified Nation" had been thoroughly scrubbed. There were men who served as pastors who never even heard of the thread, let alone saw it. In the years before 2007 there had been things that could have been scandalous but things were able to be suppressed quickly enough that things died down. That Driscoll could be verbally abusive and bullying wasn't news by 2007. As Dan Savage so bluntly put it, there were a lot of guys in leadership at the formal and informal level in Mars Hill who only concluded Mark Driscoll was a nasty piece of work when they were directly harmed by Driscoll's action. For Savage that made each and every one such man a complicit asshole.
Which is why reading James articulate that the strictly binary script the for and against crews have brought to bear on the history of Mars Hill is encouraging to see. When Wenatchee The Hatchet felt obliged to leave Mars Hill a parting concern was to observe that I can't diagnose a spiritual ailment in the community of Mars Hill without acknowledging that I am also a symptom. Those who diagnose a disease without seeing themselves as a symptom may not yet understand their contribution to the spiritual and social malaise.
That said, to get back to the earlier observation about 2007, what made things different was that by 2007 the php discussion boards made cross-campus communication and enquiry so swift and so simple that the kind of information suppressing damage control that might have worked wonderfully in the past was no longer possible. The by-laws changes and the firings did not happen in a vacuum, either. Questions had emerged about the $1.5 million boondoggle that was supposed to be Ballard campus II. It would be a huge mistake to fixate on the bylaws as indicative of a serious change for the worse within the leadership of Mars Hill because there was a unified vote for that 2005 boondoggle. Frankly the fiscal foolishness of that 2005 decision, when the details finally started to belatedly get conceded, was more infuriating than the secrecy surrounding the 2007 firings. Why? Because even the fired pastors voted for that real estate purchase.
What James Harleman's statement touches upon is that the water was coming to a boil for years before 2007. Anyone who was at Mars Hill circa 2002-2007 may recall the courtship fad and it was one of the more idiotic fads in the history of the church. Wenatchee The Hatchet's disdain for the fad would be easily known to those who know who Wenatchee The Hatchet is. It's one thing to urge people to respectfully pursue marriage in a way that respects the concerns of all concerned parties, and another to present courtship as the "Christian" alternative to modern dating practices. There's no methodology that is fire insurance against the temptation to evil in your own heart. And yet there was a weird lockstep enforcement of the story of how great courtship was. What did it matter that one of the textbook/poster couple courtships didn't exactly fit the mold? The mold was more important than the reality.
In terms of cultural enforcement there was a sense in which a culture that would enforce the silly legalisms of the courtship fad could be relied upon to enforce draconian expectations when actually important things, like governance and finances came up. Harleman's statement touches on these things but they seem worth mentioning explicitly. There were a whole lot of people who went on to be Driscoll critics who played roles in enforcing the expectations and rules formal and informal in the culture. The point here, muddled though it is, is that 2007 was symbolically important and meant a big change in formal governance but the crisis only emerged when people who were in some sense expected to keep operating by the informal script broke from their script.
What was different in 2007 was that by 2007 Mars Hill had cultivated information distribution, social media and mass media tools of the sort that made fully suppressing scandals nearly impossible. It wasn't possible, any longer, to just scrub a "Pussified Nation" away and hope nobody noticed. Ironically and yet inevitably the strengths of Mars Hill became weaknesses, the information distribution culture that had been cultivated within Mars Hill became a means of articulating the beginnings of some dissent. The php forums were swiftly scrapped and replaced with The City. As Wenatchee The Hatchet has demonstrated vividly in more than a dozen posts, even The City eventually became a point from which members expressing dissent began to leak content. Or as an old-time Mars Hill song could have put it "Strength is my weakness." When it became impossible to suppress the rumbling of discord the leadership culture had to seize control of the narrative in a forceful way, which is pretty much what happened. What James Harleman has opened up is a glimpse into how even the process of the leadership selling itself on the plausibility of what was done planted the seeds of what grew into a crisis.
The majority of readers last year probably wouldn't know Wenatchee The Hatchet has known James for at least fifteen years now. Our friendship was probably not something anyone with ten years inside MH wouldn't already know about. There's a whole lot of blogging about cartoons that wouldn't have happened the way it did without the two of us sharing many a thought about animation and about superheroes. A write-up about his book is still pending.
But in a way what James has shared about reconsidering the narrative of his life and his time at Mars Hill is an example of what he's done for years. He spent many a Friday evening over the years discussing narrative in film and ways we can analyze narrative and character arcs to discover what is or isn't true about the human condition and connect it to what he's called the meganarrative. So in many ways what James published this last weekend fits into all of that.
Others have pointed out that what happened in the last few years was that Mark Driscoll and his advocates lost control of the public narrative. That would be accurate. It might be even more accurate to add to that observation that what transpired was the narrative that had always been public was finally able to get examined with enough primary source citation and, not to put this pejoratively, critical apparatus to reveal that the public narrative had changed in ways that were drastic enough to cast legitimate doubt on its overall veracity. Driscoll was starting to contradict his own public narrative at too many points about too many big events in the story for the public narrative to remain coherent. The tipping point there was, in many ways, Real Marriage. What James Harleman's latest statement gives us at least a glimpse of is that there were people within the leadership of Mars Hill who had moments of doubt about what was going on and how they persuaded themselves things were okay, at least for a while.
This rationalization process would be easy to condemn if it weren't seeming so awkwardly evident lately that it doesn't matter what team you're on, this process of overlooking the bad because you think it's outweighed by the good can happen anywhere. It remains to be seen how things will play out regarding Tony Jones and Julie McMahon but we don't even need to look at the realm of religion. What about Penn State and Joe Paterno? Even without religious ideas at stake if there's enough money and power in play overlooking or dismissing allegations of severe wrong-doing can still happen.
Wenatchee The Hatchet admits to being a bit gloomy about the human condition. One of the laziest canards from people who seem to imagine themselves above this sort of thing would be the "lol don't drink the kool-aid" sentiment, as if humans had a capacity to inherently resist drinking kool-aid. What if drinking the kool-aid is actually inherent in what humans do? Think about it this way, what are the great works of art and philosophy if not, at the end of things, definitions and defenses of what would be worth "drinking the kool-aid" for? Take Driscoll's one-time favorite film Braveheart. What's worth killing and dying for? Freedom ... theoretically. But having never much cared for Braveheart compared to Toy Story Wenatchee The Hatchet will borrow some phrases from the buddies at Mockingbird and say that the problem with the Gibson film is that in the end it was not really a rumination on freedom as much as a rumination on the glory of fighting for freedom. Call it a theology of glory rather than theology of freedom if we're even going to "go there" in discussing the film as any theology of any kind. Certainly in the hands of a Mark Driscoll, with his career-long drive toward "legacy", it would be almost impossible not to think of that push for legacy as tinged, at least, with a theology of glory.
And this gets roundaboutly to something else Harleman touches on, that there were men in leadership who could not raise doubts about Mark Driscoll without ultimately raising doubts about their own fitness for ministry. There were men who only ended up in ministry at Mars Hill because Mark Driscoll recruited them. It could have been guys like Petry and Meyer, in fact, recruited into ministry, who ended up fired when they didn't go on script about governance. Take a group of men who ended up in ministry because they were recruited by Mark or men who came to or back to the Christian faith on account of Mars Hill and questioning Mark became too self-indicting to be emotionally sustainable.
This gets to a point that Wenatchee The Hatchet has presented before, that it's important to understand that many people over the years who have defended the situation at Mars Hill were ultimately not defending Mark Driscoll, necessarily, as they were defending themselves. People were defending their own emotional investment of their selves into what became Mars Hill. Wenatchee The Hatchet used to make defenses of how Mars Hill did things but not generally of Mark Driscoll the person, who often enough said stuff so stupid there was no point in defending that stuff. Over time Wenatchee began to realize that a defense of a conventionally evangelical Protestant, let alone Reformed, Christian confession was not only not going to benefit from any defense of Driscoll but that Mark Driscoll began to seem more and more like a RINO, Reformed-in-name-only. At length he tipped his Amyraldian hand. But by the time he did there was this problem, so many journalists and writers, even those who supposedly knew what they were talking about, had already labeled Mark Driscoll as Reformed. Even among Mark Driscoll's critics, the price of backpedaling on the narrative was too high. And it turned out to be the same for many of Mark Driscoll's supporters.
The term repentance can be easily wielded by Christians. In a setting like Mars Hill it tended to refer to either behaviors or doctrines. What beliefs needed to change? What behaviors needed to change? But there's something in addition to that that defines what repentance is in Christian terms, it's recalibrating and redefining the story we live by. When we find our story meets the story of who Christ is and what he said and did our story changes ... and it has begun to seem more and more over the years that at Mars Hill we were told "It's all about Jesus" and it began to seem as though, as more than just a few people tried to point out, that Jesus seemed to be someone remade more and more into Mark's ideal of who Jesus ought to be than the one presented in the scriptures.
Understanding that following Christ hardly entailed remaining at Mars Hill and that Mars Hill was hardly the only place (if that) in which to follow Jesus was a years-long process for Wenatchee The Hatchet. Repenting from being the kind of Christian I was while I was there isn't even a finished process and to the extent that this blog has preserved the story of Mars Hill it could be read as a form of repentance. I've never told anyone they "have" to leave Mars Hill but I've invited them to reconsider the narrative. That's a path that people may not choose to take but for those who do, it's probably a never-ending path. If anything the most dangerous thing for us would be to think we've "arrived" because, after all, wasn't that how we felt when we landed at Mars Hill?
To piggyback a bit on what James published this weekend, a more thoroughly Christian understanding of the world we live in should neither make us a hero or even a villain in the story of our lives. One of the most pernicious temptations for those who would either defend or attack what has happened within what was once known as Mars Hill is to make ourselves the hero in the narrative. If we did that while we were there let's all the more resist the temptation to do that when we are away.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
more from the Atlantic: "Buying Music is So Over"
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/buying-music-is-so-over/384790/
...
The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn about 80 percent of all revenue from recorded music, as I wrote in "The Shazam Effect." But the market for streamed music is not so concentrated. ...
Which might be interpreted as "no matter how much you love making music don't quit your day job". It might also explain why folks like Tom Petty would be willing to go to court over what they perceive to be infringement on their ideas. If someone has that big a ratio of the revenue coming in from recorded music then would shifts in that revenue feel more seismic that high up the pyramid?
...
The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn about 80 percent of all revenue from recorded music, as I wrote in "The Shazam Effect." But the market for streamed music is not so concentrated. ...
Which might be interpreted as "no matter how much you love making music don't quit your day job". It might also explain why folks like Tom Petty would be willing to go to court over what they perceive to be infringement on their ideas. If someone has that big a ratio of the revenue coming in from recorded music then would shifts in that revenue feel more seismic that high up the pyramid?
since there's an episode 7 coming along ... we may revisit the foolishness of Campbell's monomyth
Not that Wenatchee The Hatchet is necessarily going to show how stupid the monomyth is right now, in much detail, but the short version is that of the hero's journey added up as a descriptive theme it should account for the wildly divergent strains of the Faust legend in European and American colonial folklore but it doesn't quite do that.
As if that weren't enough, we live in the 21st century after all and there's yet another problematic element of the Campbellian monomyth that could be summed up be a few things from the realm of, of course, gender studies.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/
The Heroine's Journey
Haley Thurston
...
In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell says that a hero is “someone who has found or achieved or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero properly is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself.” He goes on to distinguish between physical heroes, those who do deeds, and spiritual heroes, those who “[have] learned or found a mode of experiencing the supernormal range of human spiritual life, and then come back and communicated it.”
This is a grand and beautiful model. And especially when we just leave it at “someone who has achieved something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience,” it works very well for a hero of any gender. But when Campbell gets into the specifics of what counts or is celebrated as an unusual achievement, or how that achievement goes about getting done, I start thinking “well those are pretty unambiguously good achievements, but they’re also pretty male.”
...
and since it's an article in Ribbon Farm there's so much, much more. :)
As if that weren't enough, we live in the 21st century after all and there's yet another problematic element of the Campbellian monomyth that could be summed up be a few things from the realm of, of course, gender studies.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/
The Heroine's Journey
Haley Thurston
...
In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell says that a hero is “someone who has found or achieved or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero properly is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself.” He goes on to distinguish between physical heroes, those who do deeds, and spiritual heroes, those who “[have] learned or found a mode of experiencing the supernormal range of human spiritual life, and then come back and communicated it.”
This is a grand and beautiful model. And especially when we just leave it at “someone who has achieved something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience,” it works very well for a hero of any gender. But when Campbell gets into the specifics of what counts or is celebrated as an unusual achievement, or how that achievement goes about getting done, I start thinking “well those are pretty unambiguously good achievements, but they’re also pretty male.”
...
and since it's an article in Ribbon Farm there's so much, much more. :)
50 years of Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain"
What do you know? Fifty years?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2015/01/27/381575433/fifty-years-of-steve-reichs-its-gonna-rain
Wenatchee The Hatchet has more than just a handful of recordings of music by Steve Reich. Could hardly pass up linking to this little feature.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2015/01/27/381575433/fifty-years-of-steve-reichs-its-gonna-rain
Wenatchee The Hatchet has more than just a handful of recordings of music by Steve Reich. Could hardly pass up linking to this little feature.
Atlantic Monthly: Batgirl's psychologist ...
After having spent so much time writing about the DCAU over at ... you may know where ... why wouldn't Wenatchee The Hatchet link to this? :)
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/batgirls-psychologist/384661/
http://www.underthemaskonline.com/the-arkham-sessions/
It's been a while since we revisited stuff from the DCAU. Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire was a couple of years ago. Finished in time for the 20th anniversary of the classic cartoon. Work on the essays dealing with Justice League were largely sidetracked by other blogging projects.
With 2015 here, and the tenth anniversary of the Cadmus arc coming along, Wenatchee The Hatchet's going to try to get back to blogging some about cartoons.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/batgirls-psychologist/384661/
http://www.underthemaskonline.com/the-arkham-sessions/
It's been a while since we revisited stuff from the DCAU. Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire was a couple of years ago. Finished in time for the 20th anniversary of the classic cartoon. Work on the essays dealing with Justice League were largely sidetracked by other blogging projects.
With 2015 here, and the tenth anniversary of the Cadmus arc coming along, Wenatchee The Hatchet's going to try to get back to blogging some about cartoons.
Slate's Adam Ragusea compars Tom Petty to Mark Rothko ... which begs the question who is rock n roll's Frank Stella?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/01/27/tom_petty_s_copyright_settlement_why_sam_smith_didn_t_really_plagiarize.html
Come to think of it, Petty is more like a musical Mark Rothko, in that he usually paints with only a few big splotches of solid color. Just because he’s famous for doing it, does that really mean nobody else is allowed to?
The discussion is the plagiarism suit Petty has brought forth about a song.
...
So really, all we’re talking about is the motive itself, and that’s just “Mi Sol La Sol Mi,” for you solfège singers out there. A lot more songwriters are going to owe points to Tom Petty if he in fact “owns” that simple figure, much less the idea of transposing it around in sequence.
After a few centuries of restricting ourselves to twelve chromatic tones there were only so many variations that would be possible. If Tom Petty's the Mark Rothko of rock and pop then it would be interesting to find out who rock's Frank Stella is. Or Mondrian.
Wenatchee The Hatchet has read a few folks here and there who propose that there's a problem with intellectual property that stifles creativity. That's probably not really the biggest problem in the long run. All artistic activity is ultimately the result of leisure and if people can't afford the leisure to develop artistic pursuits then the crisis is not necessarily "just" about intellectual property and its application but about patronage. No arts have thrived for long without some robust form of patronage. As the Joker put it in The Dark Knight, when you're good at something, never do it for free but perhaps that's just the movies. Perhaps in real life you'll actually spend money working in the arts buying musical gear or paintbrushes and making stuff and doing the arts at a financial and temporal loss for years.
When music is a commodity first and a service second then, yeah, maybe being willing to fight about how the commodity is understood or deployed makes some sense.
If anything we live in an era in which it has become so much easier to see how many of the boundaries between this and that style of music is formal or conceptual in the beholder rather than the creator ... we may just be better situated to observe what was written in Ecclesiastes, there's nothing new under the sun. Does this thing appear to be new? It was from days long ago.
Come to think of it, Petty is more like a musical Mark Rothko, in that he usually paints with only a few big splotches of solid color. Just because he’s famous for doing it, does that really mean nobody else is allowed to?
The discussion is the plagiarism suit Petty has brought forth about a song.
...
So really, all we’re talking about is the motive itself, and that’s just “Mi Sol La Sol Mi,” for you solfège singers out there. A lot more songwriters are going to owe points to Tom Petty if he in fact “owns” that simple figure, much less the idea of transposing it around in sequence.
Yes, I’ve seen the incriminating mash-up that digitally alters the tempo and key of the two songs to make them match and then layers them on top of each other. But man, I could find you a lot of songs that would be similarly simpatico with a few tweaks.
This is rock ‘n’ roll we’re talking about. It’s not that there’s only one way to rock, as Sammy Hagar once asserted—but the ways are finite.
After a few centuries of restricting ourselves to twelve chromatic tones there were only so many variations that would be possible. If Tom Petty's the Mark Rothko of rock and pop then it would be interesting to find out who rock's Frank Stella is. Or Mondrian.
Wenatchee The Hatchet has read a few folks here and there who propose that there's a problem with intellectual property that stifles creativity. That's probably not really the biggest problem in the long run. All artistic activity is ultimately the result of leisure and if people can't afford the leisure to develop artistic pursuits then the crisis is not necessarily "just" about intellectual property and its application but about patronage. No arts have thrived for long without some robust form of patronage. As the Joker put it in The Dark Knight, when you're good at something, never do it for free but perhaps that's just the movies. Perhaps in real life you'll actually spend money working in the arts buying musical gear or paintbrushes and making stuff and doing the arts at a financial and temporal loss for years.
When music is a commodity first and a service second then, yeah, maybe being willing to fight about how the commodity is understood or deployed makes some sense.
If anything we live in an era in which it has become so much easier to see how many of the boundaries between this and that style of music is formal or conceptual in the beholder rather than the creator ... we may just be better situated to observe what was written in Ecclesiastes, there's nothing new under the sun. Does this thing appear to be new? It was from days long ago.
on Schaeffers and shortcuts ... how Christians left and right can use proxy and celebrity as shortcuts
A few weeks back there was a lively discussion that emerged over at Mockingbird discussing the art of Thomas Kinkade and the use of observations by Francis Schaeffer to discuss themes in the arts.
http://www.mbird.com/2015/01/francis-schaeffer-on-the-problem-with-thomas-kinkades-optimistic-art/
Having grown up with some exposure to the work of Francis Schaeffer it was interesting to read Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God years ago. The son seems to have nothing much to work with except leveraging the celebrity of his father and has had less than grateful things to say about his old man. This is, in its way, fairly normal American. But if Francis Schaeffer became a hero to the Religious Right Frank Schaeffer seems to have positioned himself as a sorta religious left. "I'm not my dad" is about all he has to work with and yet as weaknesses for ideological grandstanding go the son, at length, doesn't seem much different from the father.
Sometimes it seems as though we turn into our parents not only in spite of our best efforts to not be like them but paradoxically through our most ardent efforts to not be like them. Back in the Crazy for God writings Frank seemed perfectly willing to admit he bullied his father into become more militantly opposed to abortion when Francis Schaeffer had taken a fairly standard Protestant line in the 1960s and earlier 1970s by regarding abortion as a "Catholic" issue. But after a couple of election cycles Frank's version of events suggested his father, were he alive, would have approved of reactionary anti-American terrorism. Well, if so, then wouldn't Frank have supported it back then, too?
That Frank Schaeffer took the time to plug for one of his books the week of Nelson Mandela's funeral seemed mercenary and lazy in a way that even Mark Driscoll would have thought twice about.
Wenatchee The Hatchet has been grateful for elements of Francis Schaeffer's legacy, particularly his willingness to engage the entire range of the arts. That's ... probably about as far as it goes currently, because Schaeffer asserted a few things that Wenatchee doesn't entirely agree with. Tonality in music is more optional than obligatory and atonality, pantonality and a other elements of music that erupted into the avant garde in the last century are not in any way indicative of some abandonment of a "Christian worldview" overall. Schaeffer's Christian worldview/humanism dichotomy was often reductionist. In concert music some of the most innovative contributors to the avant garde hailed from some religiously pretty conservative backgrounds. Stravinsky eventually (after a long while) returned to the Orthodox fold. Messiaen and Penderecki, Catholics.
The simplest way to describe what I think has run amok with any Schaeffer, Francis or Frank, is that too many Christians use them as shortcuts, as go-to celebrities to prove their particular points, whether for conservative or progressive score-keeping purposes.
http://www.mbird.com/2015/01/francis-schaeffer-on-the-problem-with-thomas-kinkades-optimistic-art/
Having grown up with some exposure to the work of Francis Schaeffer it was interesting to read Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God years ago. The son seems to have nothing much to work with except leveraging the celebrity of his father and has had less than grateful things to say about his old man. This is, in its way, fairly normal American. But if Francis Schaeffer became a hero to the Religious Right Frank Schaeffer seems to have positioned himself as a sorta religious left. "I'm not my dad" is about all he has to work with and yet as weaknesses for ideological grandstanding go the son, at length, doesn't seem much different from the father.
Sometimes it seems as though we turn into our parents not only in spite of our best efforts to not be like them but paradoxically through our most ardent efforts to not be like them. Back in the Crazy for God writings Frank seemed perfectly willing to admit he bullied his father into become more militantly opposed to abortion when Francis Schaeffer had taken a fairly standard Protestant line in the 1960s and earlier 1970s by regarding abortion as a "Catholic" issue. But after a couple of election cycles Frank's version of events suggested his father, were he alive, would have approved of reactionary anti-American terrorism. Well, if so, then wouldn't Frank have supported it back then, too?
That Frank Schaeffer took the time to plug for one of his books the week of Nelson Mandela's funeral seemed mercenary and lazy in a way that even Mark Driscoll would have thought twice about.
Wenatchee The Hatchet has been grateful for elements of Francis Schaeffer's legacy, particularly his willingness to engage the entire range of the arts. That's ... probably about as far as it goes currently, because Schaeffer asserted a few things that Wenatchee doesn't entirely agree with. Tonality in music is more optional than obligatory and atonality, pantonality and a other elements of music that erupted into the avant garde in the last century are not in any way indicative of some abandonment of a "Christian worldview" overall. Schaeffer's Christian worldview/humanism dichotomy was often reductionist. In concert music some of the most innovative contributors to the avant garde hailed from some religiously pretty conservative backgrounds. Stravinsky eventually (after a long while) returned to the Orthodox fold. Messiaen and Penderecki, Catholics.
The simplest way to describe what I think has run amok with any Schaeffer, Francis or Frank, is that too many Christians use them as shortcuts, as go-to celebrities to prove their particular points, whether for conservative or progressive score-keeping purposes.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Fantastic Four trailer removes any doubt that at least some of the soundtrack for the forthcoming film had to have been composed by Phillip Glass.
of course there might also be this bit of verification by way of The Guardian ...
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/27/philip-glass-to-score-forthcoming-fantastic-four-film
Glass has done film scores before so it's not a surprise he's doing soundtrack work but it IS a bit surprising he's doing soundtrack work connected to a superhero film. As composers labeled minimalists go Wenatchee The Hatchet has always preferred Steve Reich and Terry Riley and John Adams to Phillip Glass.
Apropos of composers ... today was, uh, Mozart's birthday. Not actually a huge fan of Mozart (prefer Haydn and late Beethoven, for the most part) but, hey, might as well give a nod to Mozart's birthday having mentioned Phillip Glass, eh?
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/27/philip-glass-to-score-forthcoming-fantastic-four-film
Glass has done film scores before so it's not a surprise he's doing soundtrack work but it IS a bit surprising he's doing soundtrack work connected to a superhero film. As composers labeled minimalists go Wenatchee The Hatchet has always preferred Steve Reich and Terry Riley and John Adams to Phillip Glass.
Apropos of composers ... today was, uh, Mozart's birthday. Not actually a huge fan of Mozart (prefer Haydn and late Beethoven, for the most part) but, hey, might as well give a nod to Mozart's birthday having mentioned Phillip Glass, eh?
Brad Sargent summarizes events between Tony Jones and Julie McMahon, some considerations of Rachel Held Evans reactions to Driscoll vs Jones
https://diagnosingemergent.wordpress.com/04-personal-issues-between-tony-jones-and-julie-mcmahon/
A few years back Rachel Held Evans posted "Mark Driscoll is a bully: Stand up to him" Compiling a linkathon of reasons to consider Driscoll a bully, Evans urged readers to take a stand against Driscoll. back in July 2011. When Driscoll formulated a response, "The Issue Under a Lot of Issues", the net result was to promote the then forthcoming Pastor Mark TV and book Real Marriage.
A few years back Evans wrote about why Driscoll's popularity was not discouraging to her.
http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/mark-driscoll-popularity
1. Those of us who advocate servant leadership instead of hierarchal leadership are less likely to produce “evangelical celebrities.”
Two things to consider. The first thing is that as Darryl Hart put it in a book a few years ago, evangelicalism has historically been more progressive than conservative in its political ambitions, if you look at its broader history in the United States. The second thing is that celebrity can and clearly does exist regardless of political or ideological alignment. If Francis Schaeffer has been a hero to the Christian Right, Frank Schaeffer has parlayed that into making himself a Christian Left voice, and the problem of the celebrity as shortcut for rigorous discussion and debate doesn't get avoided whichever way we turn, left or right in politics or theology.
The last two years of controversy surrounding Mark Driscoll have suggested that the reason for Driscoll's decline was he could not ultimately weather the level of internal critique and scrutiny he was subjected to. Driscoll was not "brought low" by progressives but by conservatives and evangelicals who probed him about finances, intellectual property and other issues. Evans, meanwhile, seemed to mainly have use for Mark Driscoll as a foil to make reference to during her book promotional activity.
It seems necessary even as Mark Driscoll has not appeared in public this year to highlight a problem in Rachel Held Evans' approach.
http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/driscoll-troubled-mind-william-Wallace
... Driscoll has long been known for his authoritarian leadership over Mars Hill Church, and for his controversial teachings regarding gender and sexuality. He made national news in 2006 when he blamed Ted Haggard’s affair with a male escort on Haggard’s wife for “letting herself go” and has often repeated the teaching that women who fail to please their husbands sexually (by providing regular oral sex and maintaining their attractiveness) bear some responsibility for their husbands’ infidelity.
The problem is that Driscoll never said Gayle Haggard let herself go, and one of the most pervasive progressive canards that has long since been disproven is that Driscoll ever said any such thing. While robots.txt still applies to Resurgence content the full text of the stuff Mark Driscoll actually did write about the Ted Haggard controversy is over here. Evans cited as evidence for her case an article from Salon from 2006. The problem is that, as Wenatchee The Hatchet established in exhaustive detail, AlterNet/Salon had an exceptionally poor track record of getting things down accurately about Mars Hill and Driscoll in first-round publication.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/04/valerie-tarico-publishes-article-on.html
It's to the credit of Salon and Tarico and company, though, that they went back and corrected their mistakes, misunderstandings and misrepresentations when they were brought to light. Evans has, to date, not been observed to have done that.
Evans lost no time to comment about Mark Driscoll when "Pussified Nation" was made available.
http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/driscoll-troubled-mind-william-Wallace
Evans did not provide anything by way of historical background, or social context, for what Driscoll was reacting to. For that you might want to go here. What seems striking about comparing Evans' reaction to Driscoll to Evans' reaction to a scandal related to Tony Jones is the default position: assume the best up front about Jones even though, as scandals go, the evidence regarding Jones up front seems more significantly damning with regard to Jones' character than the evidence available in the plagiarism scandal seemed to be when that scandal first broke. If anything Evans was content to rail against Mark Driscoll for having opinions she didn't agree with. The thing about the First Amendment is that it protects us from being arrested by government officers for saying things they don't approve. It doesn't mean we can't lose the confidence of the public along the way.
Now Wenatchee The Hatchet has written a few things critical of Driscoll's ideas in the past but when Tony Jones made the remarkably foolish decision to sound off on Driscoll (at all), it was hard not to see it as an idiotic and opportunistic gambit.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/more-thoughts-on-what-some-call.html
Jones' proposal that Driscoll was influenced by toxic theology hardly seems worth suggesting in light of Jones' divorce and how he seems to have handled himself along the way. Driscoll may have many, many issues but Mark and Grace Driscoll are still married, and they both consider the care of their children. As pastoral conduct goes it doesn't seem Jones is in a position to find a problem with Mark Driscoll about theology if he hasn't managed to stay married to his earlier wife. This isn't a matter of progressive or conservative politics or even theology. It's possible to propose that the restriction for an elder or pastor is "one spouse" even if we would consider the Greek to be technically "neuter". At least Driscoll's defenders could legitimately say in his defense that when he was sexually active with women he wasn't married to he wasn't even self-identifying as a Christian yet. What would Jones' account be?
Here we are in 2015 and the star with more present clout and influence "looks" like Rachel Held Evans, more than Mark Driscoll, at least for now. If there were even a hint that "maybe" Mark Driscoll did to Grace Driscoll what Tony Jones did to Julie McMahon what would Evans' reaction toward Mark Driscoll have been?
Not that Wenatchee The Hatchet has taken the "lessons" suggested by Evans seriously with respect to Mars Hill, but one of the "lessons" we could learn from the rise and fall of Mars Hill would be that without an honest and serious internal critique the idol factory chugs along in business-as-usual. If anything it seems to Wenatchee The Hatchet that Mark Driscoll and Rachel Held Evans have been two sides of the same coin. We need fewer celebrity Christians from both the left and the right. We need fewer people who reflexively defend their own team because they know where their own bread gets buttered. If the things McMahon has shared about Jones are provably true then it seems impossible for any of Jones' defenders, least of all the likes of Evans, to defend Jones out of reflex.
Now we could discuss why some people remain national treasures and heroes in spite of evidence of plagiarism. After all, Martin Luther King Jr. day was not that long ago and he's been celebrated as a hero even though there's evidence he plagiarized. But the odds that Tony Jones, whatever his flaws, is anything close to a Martin Luther King Jr. seem remote. It's possible for our heroes to also be monsters and if the progressives don't recognize this about their heroes while insisting that it is a reason to dismiss the heroes of the Christian right as false teachers then it looks like when the shoe is on the other foot nobody on either side wants to admit that their heroes have feet made of clay.
POSTSCRIPT
http://tonyj.net/blog/2015/01/27/statement-tony-jones-regarding-allegations-abuse/
Well ... there it is. Given that Jesus' teaching on divorce in the synoptics seems pretty cut and dried no matter how you choose to interpret it ...
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+19
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2010:1-12
http://biblehub.com/luke/16-18.htm
the question someone like Evans needs to consider could be framed in the following way: Mark and Grace Driscoll are still actually married. What about Tony Jones? Is he still married to the same person he was married to seven years ago? If he's not and if he's married to someone else now then couldn't a person suggest that going by the teaching attributed to Jesus in the synoptics on divorce and remarriage that Jones is not in the best position to hold up as a healthy alternative to a Driscoll?
A few years back Rachel Held Evans posted "Mark Driscoll is a bully: Stand up to him" Compiling a linkathon of reasons to consider Driscoll a bully, Evans urged readers to take a stand against Driscoll. back in July 2011. When Driscoll formulated a response, "The Issue Under a Lot of Issues", the net result was to promote the then forthcoming Pastor Mark TV and book Real Marriage.
A few years back Evans wrote about why Driscoll's popularity was not discouraging to her.
http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/mark-driscoll-popularity
1. Those of us who advocate servant leadership instead of hierarchal leadership are less likely to produce “evangelical celebrities.”
Two things to consider. The first thing is that as Darryl Hart put it in a book a few years ago, evangelicalism has historically been more progressive than conservative in its political ambitions, if you look at its broader history in the United States. The second thing is that celebrity can and clearly does exist regardless of political or ideological alignment. If Francis Schaeffer has been a hero to the Christian Right, Frank Schaeffer has parlayed that into making himself a Christian Left voice, and the problem of the celebrity as shortcut for rigorous discussion and debate doesn't get avoided whichever way we turn, left or right in politics or theology.
The last two years of controversy surrounding Mark Driscoll have suggested that the reason for Driscoll's decline was he could not ultimately weather the level of internal critique and scrutiny he was subjected to. Driscoll was not "brought low" by progressives but by conservatives and evangelicals who probed him about finances, intellectual property and other issues. Evans, meanwhile, seemed to mainly have use for Mark Driscoll as a foil to make reference to during her book promotional activity.
It seems necessary even as Mark Driscoll has not appeared in public this year to highlight a problem in Rachel Held Evans' approach.
http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/driscoll-troubled-mind-william-Wallace
... Driscoll has long been known for his authoritarian leadership over Mars Hill Church, and for his controversial teachings regarding gender and sexuality. He made national news in 2006 when he blamed Ted Haggard’s affair with a male escort on Haggard’s wife for “letting herself go” and has often repeated the teaching that women who fail to please their husbands sexually (by providing regular oral sex and maintaining their attractiveness) bear some responsibility for their husbands’ infidelity.
The problem is that Driscoll never said Gayle Haggard let herself go, and one of the most pervasive progressive canards that has long since been disproven is that Driscoll ever said any such thing. While robots.txt still applies to Resurgence content the full text of the stuff Mark Driscoll actually did write about the Ted Haggard controversy is over here. Evans cited as evidence for her case an article from Salon from 2006. The problem is that, as Wenatchee The Hatchet established in exhaustive detail, AlterNet/Salon had an exceptionally poor track record of getting things down accurately about Mars Hill and Driscoll in first-round publication.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/04/valerie-tarico-publishes-article-on.html
It's to the credit of Salon and Tarico and company, though, that they went back and corrected their mistakes, misunderstandings and misrepresentations when they were brought to light. Evans has, to date, not been observed to have done that.
Evans lost no time to comment about Mark Driscoll when "Pussified Nation" was made available.
http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/driscoll-troubled-mind-william-Wallace
Evans did not provide anything by way of historical background, or social context, for what Driscoll was reacting to. For that you might want to go here. What seems striking about comparing Evans' reaction to Driscoll to Evans' reaction to a scandal related to Tony Jones is the default position: assume the best up front about Jones even though, as scandals go, the evidence regarding Jones up front seems more significantly damning with regard to Jones' character than the evidence available in the plagiarism scandal seemed to be when that scandal first broke. If anything Evans was content to rail against Mark Driscoll for having opinions she didn't agree with. The thing about the First Amendment is that it protects us from being arrested by government officers for saying things they don't approve. It doesn't mean we can't lose the confidence of the public along the way.
Now Wenatchee The Hatchet has written a few things critical of Driscoll's ideas in the past but when Tony Jones made the remarkably foolish decision to sound off on Driscoll (at all), it was hard not to see it as an idiotic and opportunistic gambit.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/more-thoughts-on-what-some-call.html
Jones' proposal that Driscoll was influenced by toxic theology hardly seems worth suggesting in light of Jones' divorce and how he seems to have handled himself along the way. Driscoll may have many, many issues but Mark and Grace Driscoll are still married, and they both consider the care of their children. As pastoral conduct goes it doesn't seem Jones is in a position to find a problem with Mark Driscoll about theology if he hasn't managed to stay married to his earlier wife. This isn't a matter of progressive or conservative politics or even theology. It's possible to propose that the restriction for an elder or pastor is "one spouse" even if we would consider the Greek to be technically "neuter". At least Driscoll's defenders could legitimately say in his defense that when he was sexually active with women he wasn't married to he wasn't even self-identifying as a Christian yet. What would Jones' account be?
Here we are in 2015 and the star with more present clout and influence "looks" like Rachel Held Evans, more than Mark Driscoll, at least for now. If there were even a hint that "maybe" Mark Driscoll did to Grace Driscoll what Tony Jones did to Julie McMahon what would Evans' reaction toward Mark Driscoll have been?
Not that Wenatchee The Hatchet has taken the "lessons" suggested by Evans seriously with respect to Mars Hill, but one of the "lessons" we could learn from the rise and fall of Mars Hill would be that without an honest and serious internal critique the idol factory chugs along in business-as-usual. If anything it seems to Wenatchee The Hatchet that Mark Driscoll and Rachel Held Evans have been two sides of the same coin. We need fewer celebrity Christians from both the left and the right. We need fewer people who reflexively defend their own team because they know where their own bread gets buttered. If the things McMahon has shared about Jones are provably true then it seems impossible for any of Jones' defenders, least of all the likes of Evans, to defend Jones out of reflex.
Now we could discuss why some people remain national treasures and heroes in spite of evidence of plagiarism. After all, Martin Luther King Jr. day was not that long ago and he's been celebrated as a hero even though there's evidence he plagiarized. But the odds that Tony Jones, whatever his flaws, is anything close to a Martin Luther King Jr. seem remote. It's possible for our heroes to also be monsters and if the progressives don't recognize this about their heroes while insisting that it is a reason to dismiss the heroes of the Christian right as false teachers then it looks like when the shoe is on the other foot nobody on either side wants to admit that their heroes have feet made of clay.
POSTSCRIPT
http://tonyj.net/blog/2015/01/27/statement-tony-jones-regarding-allegations-abuse/
Well ... there it is. Given that Jesus' teaching on divorce in the synoptics seems pretty cut and dried no matter how you choose to interpret it ...
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+19
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2010:1-12
http://biblehub.com/luke/16-18.htm
the question someone like Evans needs to consider could be framed in the following way: Mark and Grace Driscoll are still actually married. What about Tony Jones? Is he still married to the same person he was married to seven years ago? If he's not and if he's married to someone else now then couldn't a person suggest that going by the teaching attributed to Jesus in the synoptics on divorce and remarriage that Jones is not in the best position to hold up as a healthy alternative to a Driscoll?
some brief thoughts on Samson from the book of Judges, a Sterling Archer in the Old Testament.
Samson would have to be the worst keeper of a naziritic code in the documents collected in the Bible. After all, he's said to have killed a bunch of people with a donkey's jawbone. He also consulted a prostitute and went to the trouble of seeking to marry a Phillistine. Samson, at best, inadvertently begins to bring about deliverance of Israel from Phillistine rule. Samson comes across as a self-serving, self-absorbed idiotic horndog whose lust and narcissism don't stop him from miraculously managing to save the day for corrupt and incompetent people whom he works with and for.
This may be an esoteric way of putting it for anyone who's not already into animated shows and films ... but Samson could be thought of as a kind of Sterling Archer in the book of Judges. Yeah, he's technically a protagonist in the narrative in which he appears ... but that doesn't mean he's not a complete idiot most of the time.
One of the things Wenatchee The Hatchet heard a Pentecostal youth pastor teach decades ago was that Samson offers a sober lesson, that it doesn't matter how gifted you are or how powerfully anointed you might think you or your hero is, that will never be a substitute for living a genuinely pious and ethical life. At some point or another if you presume upon the power and aid of God you may find it leaves you in your moment of testing and you don't pass the test. It doesn't mean God can't or won't save you, but it might mean that you get to feel the full force of the consequences for your own life of self-serving idiocy.
Throughout the narrative of Judges Samson generally does what he does in spite of his motives. He comes across as a cheater in the riddle he poses at his own wedding, leaning heavily on an incident only he was present for, a set of actions that involved him scooping honey out of the carcass of a lion and feeding it not just to himself but to his parents, thus defiling them all and rendering them impure within the strictures of the naziritic observance. Samson also uses a donkey's jawbone to kill a mess of people, yet another case in which Samson blithely ignored one of the few rules of purifying separation the nazirite was supposed to adhere to. At the end of his life, when he killed more Phillistines in his death than while he lived, he asks to get vengeance against his enemies for his two eyes, not out of any loyalty or consideration for Israel as a whole.
And yet Samson was mentioned as one of the heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11. It's as though Samson spent his whole life trying to live life just like any Phillistine, even going so far as to pursue Phillistine women. If he's a saint it's because God would not let go him of him not because Samson demonstrated any will to be particularly obedient to God about fairly basic rules of conduct for a Jewish person in that time and place.
Lately, since Wenatchee The Hatchet finally got around to watching Archer, and Samson does come across as being somewhat like the randy and uncouth protagonist of that cartoon.
What made Samson a hero? Well, from an Israelite standpoint, God used Samson, generally in spite of Samson's own motives ,to exact punishment on the Phillistines, who were enemies of Israel for a while. Samson did seem to have flashes of awareness that the power he had was given by God but by and large his acknowledgments of Yahweh appear in Judges 15:18 and 16:28-30. The rest of the time it doesn't seem as though Samson had much thought for God even when the power of God worked through him to kill Phillistines.
What is striking about those upon whom the spirit of God works in the book of Judges is that they don't lose their individual agency. If anything they not only don't lose their agency they seem to go on and say or do the things that are most characteristically flawed about them. After Gideon is clothed in the spirit of the Lord what does he do? He puts out that fleece, unsure that Yahweh is really with him after all. Jephthah makes a weirdly calculated vow that IF God is with him and gives him a victory then he'd sacrifice ... whatever ... happens to come out to greet him. As Barry Webb explained in his commentary on Judges, the vow was a hedging and calculated sort of vow and it also suggests that Jephthah didn't even have any clear sense that the spirit of God was upon him. Webb lays out an exegetical case for why the burnt offering/holocaust interpretation has to be rendered literally. Jephthah actually shifts the blame to his daughter for coming out to greet him and his daughter, revealing a level of integrity and selflessness Jephthah did not match, accepts the vow as binding. Jephthah, depending on how we read the text, does not come across as someone who would ignore or nullify the vow. Why Jephthah was considered a hero would have to be explained another time, largely in terms of his willingness as an ostracized bastard cast out of his family inheritance and clan to nevertheless be willing, even conditionally, to fight to rescue Israelites from a war. That Jepthah was the first judge that was nominated by Israelites rather than directly appointed or called by the Lord would be another topic to discuss at another time.
All that to say, it's not a big surprise if you engage carefully with Judges to see that the men who are empowered by God to do great and remarkable things don't stop being precisely as bad as they were before God called them. If anything they go on to get worse. The slide toward apostasy in Israel began before Gideon was even dead, a foreboding development in the narrative of Judges.
When Samson tells his father he wants to marry that Phillistine woman he says "Get her for me, for she's the right one in my eyes" the foreshadowing of the end of the book of Judges is clear. Samson, as judge, articulates the "right in his own eyes" ethos that becomes the end of the book as a whole. The leader, sort of, pioneers by example the moral decline of the people while also reflecting it.
Long ago, back in the early Mars Hill days, on the older Midrash, there were some who theorized, no, asserted that Samson turned out to be as bad as he did because his parents dropped the ball. Parenting fail, big time. But the text of Judges never indicates this even once. The Bible has at least a handful of stories of children who turn out to be remarkably different in character from their parents. Samson seems heedless of the naziritic code and does not lose his strength after repeated in fractions against it. He touches corpses, he kills willy-nilly, he visits a prostitute, pursues Phillistine women, and "may" have ignored the ban on grapes, too. Cutting the hair was the last straw, the one last rule Samson hadn't broken along the way of being probably the worst nazirite in the Bible.
Samson's life does not look like the life of someone transformed from a bad person into a righteous person. No, he pretty much stays bad from start to finish. And yet he's mentioned as one of the heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11.
This may be an esoteric way of putting it for anyone who's not already into animated shows and films ... but Samson could be thought of as a kind of Sterling Archer in the book of Judges. Yeah, he's technically a protagonist in the narrative in which he appears ... but that doesn't mean he's not a complete idiot most of the time.
One of the things Wenatchee The Hatchet heard a Pentecostal youth pastor teach decades ago was that Samson offers a sober lesson, that it doesn't matter how gifted you are or how powerfully anointed you might think you or your hero is, that will never be a substitute for living a genuinely pious and ethical life. At some point or another if you presume upon the power and aid of God you may find it leaves you in your moment of testing and you don't pass the test. It doesn't mean God can't or won't save you, but it might mean that you get to feel the full force of the consequences for your own life of self-serving idiocy.
Throughout the narrative of Judges Samson generally does what he does in spite of his motives. He comes across as a cheater in the riddle he poses at his own wedding, leaning heavily on an incident only he was present for, a set of actions that involved him scooping honey out of the carcass of a lion and feeding it not just to himself but to his parents, thus defiling them all and rendering them impure within the strictures of the naziritic observance. Samson also uses a donkey's jawbone to kill a mess of people, yet another case in which Samson blithely ignored one of the few rules of purifying separation the nazirite was supposed to adhere to. At the end of his life, when he killed more Phillistines in his death than while he lived, he asks to get vengeance against his enemies for his two eyes, not out of any loyalty or consideration for Israel as a whole.
And yet Samson was mentioned as one of the heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11. It's as though Samson spent his whole life trying to live life just like any Phillistine, even going so far as to pursue Phillistine women. If he's a saint it's because God would not let go him of him not because Samson demonstrated any will to be particularly obedient to God about fairly basic rules of conduct for a Jewish person in that time and place.
Lately, since Wenatchee The Hatchet finally got around to watching Archer, and Samson does come across as being somewhat like the randy and uncouth protagonist of that cartoon.
What made Samson a hero? Well, from an Israelite standpoint, God used Samson, generally in spite of Samson's own motives ,to exact punishment on the Phillistines, who were enemies of Israel for a while. Samson did seem to have flashes of awareness that the power he had was given by God but by and large his acknowledgments of Yahweh appear in Judges 15:18 and 16:28-30. The rest of the time it doesn't seem as though Samson had much thought for God even when the power of God worked through him to kill Phillistines.
What is striking about those upon whom the spirit of God works in the book of Judges is that they don't lose their individual agency. If anything they not only don't lose their agency they seem to go on and say or do the things that are most characteristically flawed about them. After Gideon is clothed in the spirit of the Lord what does he do? He puts out that fleece, unsure that Yahweh is really with him after all. Jephthah makes a weirdly calculated vow that IF God is with him and gives him a victory then he'd sacrifice ... whatever ... happens to come out to greet him. As Barry Webb explained in his commentary on Judges, the vow was a hedging and calculated sort of vow and it also suggests that Jephthah didn't even have any clear sense that the spirit of God was upon him. Webb lays out an exegetical case for why the burnt offering/holocaust interpretation has to be rendered literally. Jephthah actually shifts the blame to his daughter for coming out to greet him and his daughter, revealing a level of integrity and selflessness Jephthah did not match, accepts the vow as binding. Jephthah, depending on how we read the text, does not come across as someone who would ignore or nullify the vow. Why Jephthah was considered a hero would have to be explained another time, largely in terms of his willingness as an ostracized bastard cast out of his family inheritance and clan to nevertheless be willing, even conditionally, to fight to rescue Israelites from a war. That Jepthah was the first judge that was nominated by Israelites rather than directly appointed or called by the Lord would be another topic to discuss at another time.
All that to say, it's not a big surprise if you engage carefully with Judges to see that the men who are empowered by God to do great and remarkable things don't stop being precisely as bad as they were before God called them. If anything they go on to get worse. The slide toward apostasy in Israel began before Gideon was even dead, a foreboding development in the narrative of Judges.
When Samson tells his father he wants to marry that Phillistine woman he says "Get her for me, for she's the right one in my eyes" the foreshadowing of the end of the book of Judges is clear. Samson, as judge, articulates the "right in his own eyes" ethos that becomes the end of the book as a whole. The leader, sort of, pioneers by example the moral decline of the people while also reflecting it.
Long ago, back in the early Mars Hill days, on the older Midrash, there were some who theorized, no, asserted that Samson turned out to be as bad as he did because his parents dropped the ball. Parenting fail, big time. But the text of Judges never indicates this even once. The Bible has at least a handful of stories of children who turn out to be remarkably different in character from their parents. Samson seems heedless of the naziritic code and does not lose his strength after repeated in fractions against it. He touches corpses, he kills willy-nilly, he visits a prostitute, pursues Phillistine women, and "may" have ignored the ban on grapes, too. Cutting the hair was the last straw, the one last rule Samson hadn't broken along the way of being probably the worst nazirite in the Bible.
Samson's life does not look like the life of someone transformed from a bad person into a righteous person. No, he pretty much stays bad from start to finish. And yet he's mentioned as one of the heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11.
Monday, January 26, 2015
on plucked strings 2: the physics of the sound of the banjo
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-secret-of-the-banjos-sound-revealed-d45f811ddf3d
A little older but still worth a reading. That drumhead foundation for the bridge makes all the difference, it turns out, for defining the sound of the instrument.
A little older but still worth a reading. That drumhead foundation for the bridge makes all the difference, it turns out, for defining the sound of the instrument.
on plucked strings 1: Atlantic Monthly "the rise and fall (and rise) of the ukulele
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/though-it-be-little-the-rise-of-the-ukulele/384453/
Been sketching out ideas for a sonata for ukulele and guitar for months. Reentrant tuning takes some getting used to but there's a pretty sweet split-third C chord latent within that tuning that is probably going to be the basis for some music, ideally.
Been sketching out ideas for a sonata for ukulele and guitar for months. Reentrant tuning takes some getting used to but there's a pretty sweet split-third C chord latent within that tuning that is probably going to be the basis for some music, ideally.
another from the Atlantic ... inexplicably yet explicably about Taylor Swift's navel?
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/taylor-swift-and-the-fraught-history-of-navel-gazing/384811/
There are reasons the internet does not "need" to exist but there's a paragraph that sort of peeked out
from amidst the article. There's a cultural history in some parts about some parts being ciphers for other parts.
All the jokey chatter around Swift's alleged non-human-ness is amusing enough, but it also inadvertently references decades of earlier American cultural history during which the female navel was seen as indescribably problematic, and a thing that should remain shrouded. In his book The Naked Ape, zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morris wrote that this immense discomfort stemmed from the fact that the female navel was essentially a "genital echo," a kind of symbolic "pseudo-vagina." The belly button served to draw the eye southward, like cleavage (or with men, like the "abdominal V").
"genital echo"? ... okay ... so if a certain megachurch preacher had tried this more mediating approach ... would the "pseudo-vagina" have made more sense of Song of Songs 2 or ... of Proverbs 3?
for sake of review ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/real-marriage-in-january-2012-and_30.html
There are reasons the internet does not "need" to exist but there's a paragraph that sort of peeked out
from amidst the article. There's a cultural history in some parts about some parts being ciphers for other parts.
All the jokey chatter around Swift's alleged non-human-ness is amusing enough, but it also inadvertently references decades of earlier American cultural history during which the female navel was seen as indescribably problematic, and a thing that should remain shrouded. In his book The Naked Ape, zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morris wrote that this immense discomfort stemmed from the fact that the female navel was essentially a "genital echo," a kind of symbolic "pseudo-vagina." The belly button served to draw the eye southward, like cleavage (or with men, like the "abdominal V").
"genital echo"? ... okay ... so if a certain megachurch preacher had tried this more mediating approach ... would the "pseudo-vagina" have made more sense of Song of Songs 2 or ... of Proverbs 3?
for sake of review ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/real-marriage-in-january-2012-and_30.html
Atlantic: "Genetic Testing and Tribal Identity" the ethics of scientific research on Native American artifacts and informed consent
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-cultural-limitations-of-genetic-testing/384740/
Short version, scientists have ethical questions they have to face about what they are and aren't expected to share in advance before obtaining genetic samples to do research. In one case genetic material was obtained for two goals, the first to assess diabetic frequency and the other to map travel and migration patterns--the former was rejected while the latter was accepted. But there's been ... kind of a history of scientists just taking stuff without bothering to get consent, informed or otherwise, to do research.
In an era in which information about genetics can be put to a wide range of uses the ethics of obtaining informed consent and actual permission before doing something have become more crucial in genetic research. In at least one case, summarized in the article, it is absolutely not better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission if someone decides to file litigation, or is it?
Short version, scientists have ethical questions they have to face about what they are and aren't expected to share in advance before obtaining genetic samples to do research. In one case genetic material was obtained for two goals, the first to assess diabetic frequency and the other to map travel and migration patterns--the former was rejected while the latter was accepted. But there's been ... kind of a history of scientists just taking stuff without bothering to get consent, informed or otherwise, to do research.
In an era in which information about genetics can be put to a wide range of uses the ethics of obtaining informed consent and actual permission before doing something have become more crucial in genetic research. In at least one case, summarized in the article, it is absolutely not better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission if someone decides to file litigation, or is it?
Saturday, January 24, 2015
from The Guardian: "I dreamed a DreamWorks: how to reverse the failing studio's fortunes" i.e. don't try for Shrek 5
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/23/dreamworks-failing-turbo-penguins-of-Madagascar
In the grand tally of films by DreamWorks the only two that Wenatchee thought were solid were Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon (haven't seen the sequels for either). Much that could be said about DreamWorks face has already been said.
edit: let's see if this variation works
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/23/dreamworks-failing-turbo-penguins-of-madagascar
In the grand tally of films by DreamWorks the only two that Wenatchee thought were solid were Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon (haven't seen the sequels for either). Much that could be said about DreamWorks face has already been said.
edit: let's see if this variation works
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/23/dreamworks-failing-turbo-penguins-of-madagascar
arguments for a lost middlebrow? Comparing ArtsJournal writers Scott Timberg and Terry Teachout on the loss of a cultural middle
http://artsfuse.org/120923/fuse-interview-scott-timberg-looks-at-the-culture-crash-square-in-the-eye/
AF: The meaning of middlebrow is a bit slippery in the book — it includes indie rock. Unlike Dwight Macdonald, I want middlebrow art to exist — but do I have to like it?
Timberg: Middlebrow has always been a complicated/ ambiguous concept – or set of concepts – and I may have done it no favors here.
When I lament the loss of middlebrow, I’m not saying I want nothing but overplayed warhorses at symphony orchestras, nothing but Matisse shows at the museum, etc. What I miss is the notion that art is somehow clarifying or restorative, and that a broad public education and media push is worth investing in. Middlebrow means Leonard Bernstein on TV, Thelonious Monk on the cover of Time, Anne Sexton learning how to write a sonnet on public television, Lionel Trilling and Auden leading a book club for non-scholarly readers, public school art classes, etc. It says there’s something valuable about culture that goes beyond money (what the neoliberal or capitalist values) or shock value (what much of the cultural left values.)
Middlebrow, whatever its fault and blind spots and earnest pieties, values literature and the arts as aspects of human achievement.
Don’t think indie rock is really middlebrow in any way, but I included it in that section about “Restoring the Middle” because it (like indie film) is built on mid-size budgets and a middle-class audience. If you say you like, say, the films of Spike Jonze and bands like Pavement or TV on the Radio, your taste may have a bit of the avant-garde in it (or what we called in the ‘90s “cutting edge”) but economically, they are in the middle. (That is, they are neither blockbusters nor micro-finances shoestring operations, both extremes which have grown in the 21st century.)
And, no, you don’t have to like it. (I often don’t.) It’s about an ecosystem, not any of the individual flora and fauna within it. When it dies, everything around it starts to wither.
I.e. the middlebrow may still suck and all but we need it for a healthy cultural biosphere. It seems a bit strange but perhaps lamenting the loss of the middlebrow culture is as much a lament for the decline of a middleclass as it actually is. Another bit from the site.
... lot of what my book describes involves unintended consequences, and I think this is what happened here. This is a place where I never intended to end up; I was once a Wesleyan English major besotted with postmodern literature, experimental music and French theory, so I had to go against a lot of my instincts to see that it was the middle, not the edges, that needed restoring.
But in a nutshell, the people responsible for passing down the value of art – humanities professors and culture critics, for example, and media-savvy artists like Warhol – lost their nerve, or their faith. The priesthood stopped telling the flock that art was sacred or transcendent or a path to wisdom, and began calling it sexist, built on hegemony, a formation of cultural capital, an endlessly deferred signifier, etc. Some of this was true, at least in part. I don’t want to sound like Bill Bennett or Lynne Cheney and reject it all. But there was a price to be paid in the longterm for this.
And this overlapped with a movement going back to 19th century Paris – romantic bohemianism – which separated art from the marketplace and divorced the bohemian from the bourgeoisie. A lot of great art and poetry comes from that period. But all this stuff has consequences.
One writer who brought me around to seeing all this, by the way, was David Foster Wallace
Even a cursory observation of some boy band that was at one point known as The Beatles might have made a case for the middle. Maybe "Revolution Number Nine" was just a knock-off of stuff that had been done earlier by Stockhausen but the point should not be lost that mainstreaming musical ideas explored by Stockhausen is not something every pop band has ever done. So, yeah, maybe we do need the middle.
Even a cursory observation of some boy band that was at one point known as The Beatles might have made a case for the middle. Maybe "Revolution Number Nine" was just a knock-off of stuff that had been done earlier by Stockhausen but the point should not be lost that mainstreaming musical ideas explored by Stockhausen is not something every pop band has ever done. So, yeah, maybe we do need the middle.
One of the difficulties of consigning the Western canon of the arts to some dustbin of imperialist/colonial oppression is that you can end up throwing out the good as well as the bad.
Let's take a recent piece in The Atlantic. Michael Godsey penned a little something wondering whether education in the US provides wisdom, the sort of wisdom that has in the past been transmitted through things like the Bible or Shakespeare or various authors:
...
But as a man who used to be a high school student interested in pursuing wisdom, I’m almost startled to find myself up late at night, literally studying these anchor standards instead of Hamlet itself. I’m making plans to teach the students how to "evaluate the sufficiency of the evidence" instead of asking them, "Who here sympathizes with Hamlet, or Ophelia, or any character, and how so?"
...I get it: My job is to teach communication, not values, and maybe that’s reasonable. After all, I’m not sure I would want my daughter gaining her wisdom from a randomly selected high-school teacher just because he passed a few writing and literature courses at a state university (which is what I did). My job description has evolved, and I’m fine with that. [WtH are you sure?] But where are the students getting their wisdom?
...
Secular wisdom in the public schools seems like it should inherently spring from the literature that’s shaped American culture. And while the students focus on how Whitman’s "purpose shapes the content and style of his text," they’re obviously exposed to the words that describe his leaves of grass. And that’s good. But there is a noticeable deprioritization of literature, and a crumbling consensus regarding the nation’s idea of classic literature. The Common Core requires only Shakespeare, which is puzzling if only for its singularity. (A respected colleague recently called this stipulation "offensive," immediately rejecting "the audacity of elevating any of [Shakespeare’s] plays over anything ever written by anybody else.")
It seems particularly noteworthy that in a review of Timberg's Culture Crash, someone made the following acerbic observation.
http://artsfuse.org/120537/fuse-book-review-culture-crash-the-people-who-followed-their-bliss-off-a-cliff/
Why hasn’t the fate of creative professionals gotten the attention Timberg thinks we deserve? He thinks it’s a residue of either the romantic expectation that artists are misunderstood geniuses who do their best work from garrets or pervasive anti-intellectualism, “part of a larger revolt against experts and expertise.” He even brings in reference to the Puritans. But much more likely, it’s the fact that the remaining media organizations and the digital platforms that are the distribution channels for cultural work are the ones whose bread is being buttered. The people at the tops of those distribution channels are doing great.
“If we’re not careful, culture work will become a luxury, like a vacation home,” Timberg writes. It’s a good line, and one that anyone who values a diverse cultural ecology would want to affirm. What he doesn’t want to admit is that, absent direct patronage, professional culture workers have often depended on outside sources of income. For some it was the second job (in the post-war period, that job was primarily teaching, a job indirectly subsidized by the government in the form of the G.I. Bill fostering a new population of students). For others, it was something unrelated (meet pediatrician William Carlos Williams). For many (more than we have usually acknowledged and certainly more than today’s BFA and MFA students are aware) it was a trust fund, family member, or a spouse of means. That cushion made it possible for a talented person work on a novel or a painting until the work could earn respect, if not a proportionate wage for the work the artist put into it. Maybe the market would respond, and maybe it wouldn’t, but at least the creative person had a chance to find out.
That’s one of the reasons that pop culture exhortations to follow one’s bliss are so maddening. They imply a kind of privilege at the very heart of the class structures Americans are eager to say don’t exist. The fraying of the middle class is not just something that has happened to creatives. It’s just that Timberg never thought that what had happened to unionized manufacturing workers could happen to the educated type of knowledge workers who worked at the LA Times It's ironic when American culture sorts feel obliged to mention Puritans in the 21st century because whatever flaws the Puritans had those people wrote a lot. Ever try to read The Christian in Complete Armor by William Gurnall? The arts have always been the work of those with the leisure to work on them. If there's a crisis in the creative class perhaps we could just throw in a cranky observation from someone like Paul Hindemith about how the problem with American musical education was that all it was good for was teaching people to be music teachers who would teach music teachers. The idea that music could be taught so that amateurs could make and enjoy music ... maybe that wasn't so on the table. As music became more and more about what was committed to recordings the idea that music could be something people played together on a weekend rather than hitting the theater to see a movie (indie or otherwise) may have played a century-long role here.
Debra Cash is right to point out that without a clear grasp of the patronage systems that have been in place a lament about the loss of a creative class can be missing a few important points. To the degree to which composers and musicians are expected to directly monetize what they do and struggle to find ways to do that in the face of corporate patronage there can be an invitation to "follow your dream" that doesn't account for economic realities.
At the risk of pointing something else out, we live in an era in which the economics of paths can make it seem as though an aspiring artist can choose one of a number of paths that in the past were not mutually exclusive but that "might" be now. Bach could afford to have almost two dozen kids. He was part of a lineage of musicians. In the United States at this point it seems you could choose to build a family or build an artistic career of some kind but you're not necessarily going to do both unless you've landed a lot of money. If the ideal of some kind of bohemian cultural innovator in the past was a life of sex, drugs and rock and roll it seems that nowadays you should avoid the drugs and you get to pick either sex or the rock and roll but you'll end up talking with a collections agency if you try to get both at the same time. Maybe in this era of America you've gotta pick the art or the sex whether or not its rock and roll.
The idea that the arts could be pursued after you've done everything else you "have" to do to get by in life never even seems to be on the table. It's as though there's this all-or-nothing thing about the arts. You've either got to be a writer or a musician vocationally or you're not in the arts at all. That doesn't seem to account for history, as Cash has noted in her review of Timberg's book. There were the trust funds and all that but there were also the teaching jobs. To bring up Charles Ives, what he did was work in the insurance business. Bach had a wide variety of duties that did not just include the required cantatas for the liturgical year.
The political battles over the import of what classic literature, American or otherwise, seems to have been fought and won already. It's not a huge surprise that a loss of a middle class might eventually include a lament for a loss of a middlebrow could span the political spectrum. Timberg's been featured at ArtFuse and links to stuff at Salon. Terry Teachout's writing is more likely to appear in, say, Commentary. But it's interesting to compare Timberg's concern about a loss of a middlebrow to Teachout's comments.
All these things were manifestations of what I refer to in the introduction to A Terry Teachout Reader as the culture of “middlebrow aspiration”:
Put this way it could almost seem as though the value of middle brow culture would be its capacity to understand and appreciate the value of both the "high" and the "low" without denigrating one or the other on the basis of some ideology of class warfare either in economics or the arts. Just as city dwellers can’t understand what it meant for the residents of a rural town to wake up one day and find themselves within driving distance of a Wal-Mart, so are they incapable of properly appreciating the true significance of middlebrow culture. For all its flaws, it nurtured at least two generations’ worth of Americans who, like me, went on to become full-fledged highbrows–but highbrows who, while accepting the existence of a hierarchy of values in art, never lost sight of the value of popular culture.Though middlebrow cultural aspiration was already on its last legs when I came along, small towns tend to be a bit behind the curve. Not only did I get a stiff dose of it, but it took: I studied music, tried out for plays, read books by the carload, and spent virtually every nickel of my modest allowance on records of every imaginable kind. What’s more, my parents, puzzled though they were by my burgeoning strangeness, backed me to the hilt. They took me to the public library as often as I cared to go, and later on they bought me an encyclopedia, a violin, a piano, a guitar, and an electric bass, spending money they couldn’t easily spare in order to give me opportunities they’d never had to explore a world of whose existence they were largely unaware.
It's not a particularly original observation that during the Cold War in the West classical music seemed straitjacketed by dodecaphonic academics while in the Soviet bloc Socialist Realism imposed a different kind of draconian set of rules on musicians. Both were different modes of cultural repression. If in the Soviet bloc music was considered bad if it took more than one listening to understand it in an era in which Elliott Carter was praised (not that he hasn't composed some music WtH sorta likes) the very idea of tonality was abjured. Both enterprises could be seen as, well, a kind of ideological warfare in which whatever could have been the "middle", let alone whatever was on the "other" side was villainized.
The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart? Well, anyway ... .
"people will look back on the current era of new music and characterize it in terms not far removed from tourism", by "new music" let's say new concert/classical music
http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/boston-passports-and-layovers-from-lorelei-and-roomful-of-teeth/
Matthew Guerrieri wrote ... :
I sometimes wonder if, several decades from now, people will look back on the current era of new music and characterize it in terms not far removed from tourism. Because if there’s one thing common to the various kinds of music going under the new music banner right now (and a lot of music beyond that), it’s the pursuit and/or assertion of an aura of authenticity. Traditions, styles, vernaculars—so many new pieces I hear these days pledge allegiance to some form of authenticity, some repertoire, some community. A lot of times, such pieces are the result of a deep engagement with the cited style on the part of composer and performer; a lot of times, it’s simply an expression of momentary curiosity. But much of the listener’s intended satisfaction is to come from the feeling that the experience has been both unfamiliar and authentic. In other words: the ideal tourist experience. Which means that the real version and the airport version might, in fact, be equally effective.
...
Early American hymnody and shape-note singing might be two of the most quintessentially American musics there are, in that they live at a nexus of American anxiety—the disconnect between the way the country ought to be and the way that it actually is. Both were aspirational forms, specifically designed to be specifically American, and both were, in turn, often rejected as being too provincial and unpolished. You only really get a sense of this stew of influence and counter-influence in the context of its relatives: the more buttoned-down, reactionary New England hymnody of the later 18th century, African-American gospel, Gilded Age grandeur, maybe even modern Christian rock-pop, a continuous negotiation between exaltation and populism.
There might be something to this. In popular music there seems to be a broad leveling of the aesthetic parameters. There's a propensity for pop songs to start sounding the same across formal distinctions of style and genre. If you use Marshall amps and old Gibsons you might be rock and if you use a Telecaster you "might" have country but the I, IV and V and vi may pretty much be the same.
In more "classical" parts, especially in what is sometimes known as new music, the dynamic can be a bit different. Heard a piece a couple of weeks ago in which music had been composed around field recordings of frogs in Bali. For those not familiar with the field recording approach to the more avant garde classical stuff ... well .... Wenatchee's not going to pretend to be intimately acquainted with that field of music. There's some fun and interesting stuff in it but perhaps it is most emblematic or symptomatic of a kind of compositional tourism.
Concert programs can tend to just get that way. Mostly Mozart. Guitarists tend to inevitably get to music from Spain or central and south America. Matanya Ophee used to talk about how he'd hear Polish guitarists playing Catalan folk songs but never recalled hearing Catalan guitarists playing Polish folk songs.
One of the advantages of living in a place liked the United States a decade or so into the age of the internet is that we have access to unprecedented amounts of music with an unprecedented variety of styles. A potential pitfall to this may be that what we do with that amounts to the above mentioned musical tourism. If someone were sufficiently lefty or progressive in thoughts the idea of musical tourism as a compositional approach could be construed as symbolic of the imperialistic/colonial imagination in which Americans perpetuate a hegemony of cultural assimilation in which everything in some form eventually becomes "American". :) A kind of cultural Trapper Keeper 2000 ...
Since, as proposed above, attempts at genuinely American musical forms could be viewed as too provincial or ineffective it may be a fate of American music to always be an assimilative process.
Two articles in the Atlantic spring to mind. There's a more recent one discussing a book about the American songbook.
And a thematically related one about the end of jazz.
... The great overlap between the Songbook and the jazz catalogue largely explains a fact that troubles Gioia—that his book can enshrine “few recent compositions”—and raises doubts about his assertion, supported by passion rather than by argument, that “the jazz idiom [is] a vibrant, present-day endeavor.”
The Songbook and jazz evolved symbiotically. As the critic Gene Lees showed in an important essay in The Oxford Companion to Jazz (2000), the creators of both were musically sophisticated men and women who inevitably and profoundly responded to each other’s work. (Lees’s scholarship made clear the deep musical education of the jazz pioneers, and in the process put to rest the “subtly racist” idea that “jazz was created intuitively by a gifted but ignorant people in some sort of cultural vacuum.”) The result: the Songbook formed the lingua franca of jazz; its material provided the basis on which to assess a performer’s improvisations; and jazz musicians constructed their own compositions on the chord structures of its entries.
If the traditions of Tin Pan Alley songwriting, ragtime, and early blues all interacted to synergistically define the jazz age then the decline of the other two would make a decline in a third more or less natural. If blues and the Tin Pan Alley era songbook have been on a decline or declined then jazz, which owed so much to both, would not be as prominent in the cultural landscape. In order to appreciate the possibilities of musical reinterpretation and reinvention in one tradition you have to understand its engagement with the other traditions.
By way of a possible contrast, the relevancy of Johnny Cash or Ray Charles may be in some way reduceable to the fact that they may have started in this or that genre but they retained to their dying years a capacity to interpret across formal styles. The musicians we seem to lionize seem to be either those who are unparalleled specialists in a particular style of music or those whose ability to make music with an encyclopedic grasp of the variety and unity in a multiplicity of idioms. The coherence of popular musical styles overall can be overlooked, especially by those who just don't like popular musical styles.
If there's any point that can be overlooked in the dominance of popular music it would be the song. People don't listen to instrumental music by choice in an American popular landscape. IF we live in an era in which you get put on hold waiting to talk to a customer service representative or a government employee and you hear classical music or you hear Kind of Blue by Miles Davis then classics, whether jazz or concert music, become the sound of people not giving a damn if they respond to your enquiry in the timeliest manner, or that's how you might be tempted to feel about it.
In a polemic over at Jacobin (surprise, right?) John Halle wrote:
The rock and popular music canon is almost exclusively defined by vocal music, that is, songs, many of them admittedly great songs. While we might call sonatas by Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann character pieces, Bartok Mikrokosmos and other staples of the introductory repertoire, “songs” that’s just a metaphor. These are works of “pure” music which cohere, not by a text with its own self-contained expressive content and narrative logic, but by a logic entirely based on the abstract relationships inherent in the pitches and rhythms. They are composed within abstract forms, large-scale plans dictating their unfolding in time of which at least an intuitive awareness is required for them to be fully appreciated by audiences
In a rare moment of invoking a line from Billy Joel, the musician went through a phase of complaining about "the tyranny of the lyric" and talking about composing instrumental music. That's an evocative line, that tyranny of the lyric. Does it suggest, maybe, that people don't want to listen to music that doesn't put the human voice front and center? Does it suggest that there's a prison inherent in having lyrics because lyrics have to be about something long enough for people to keep listening? Think of an old line from a Talking Heads album asserting that lyrics are simply a trick to get people to listen to music longer ... .
It's possible to lament that pop songs have existed in the straitjacket of the 3 1/2 minute envelope but let's not forget why that was, the limits of recording technology and production. If Armstrong, Ellington and early jazz musicians mastered saying as much as possible in such a short musical moment the process and goal were pragmatic rather than ideological. Sure, we can talk about how technology is never neutral but suggesting that Ellington or Armstrong were somehow complicit in some dumbing down of culture in how and why they wrote music that fit the strictures available seems a bit far-fetched.
Now perhaps its possible that the symphony was the great big pot roast and the pop songs are chicken wings but the Romantic era saw an explosion of song, didn't it? Maybe the shortening of scale has partly been offset by a broadening of horizons in some way. Listen to the complete recordings of Robert Johnson without an appreciation for detail and you're going to feel as though thirty blues numbers by Robert Johnson sound as much the same as thirty string quartets by Haydn but both are great in their respective ways.
Indulging in some fanciful thought for a weekend, the complaint about the potato chip seems easy to understand but perhaps the advantage the potato chip has is that the potato chip can vary in flavor in a way that a single cooked potato cannot. We shouldn't forget the penchant for exoticism in concert music has been as much a feature as a bug in the classical tradition as the popular style. While there are potential flaws with the sampler plate form of cultural tourism via music these days there were drawbacks to monolithic iterations of advocacy for a single culture. I.e. Wenatchee The Hatchet loathes the music and ideas of Wagner. If that's the pot roast then by all means let's stick with chicken wings.
Not particularly a fan of "authenticity" as such. The authentic now seems one of the more easily faked things. Sincerity may be the new insincerity. Bear in mind Wenatchee The Hatchet spent a decade inside the culture of Mars Hill so perhaps skepticism about "real" or "authentic" may be an overcompensating impulse.
As for musical styles and the United States, might be impossible to improve upon Virgil Thomson's axiom that being an American composer is simple, first be an American and then just write whatever music you want. Whether or not that ends up being a kind of composerly tourism or not ... may ultimately not matter. But it's interesting to think about sometimes.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
a general observation, let's put the "no true scotsman" defense away, especially if it's for "our" team
Whether we're looking at the life and times of a Mark Driscoll or a John Yoder or another hero for this or that team we're past the point where any of us can plausibly say there aren't some very ugly and putrid skeletons in the closets of our respective teams. Now is not an era (if there ever even was one) to lean heavily on a "no true Scotsman" defense of "our team".
In general it seems that it doesn't matter what the team is. It could be Mark Driscoll or it could be Tony Jones or it could be John Yoder or Richard Dawkins or someone else. Someone says or does something incendiary and a defense can be made on the idea that whatever bad might be historically associated with X is because X wasn't really that way but was Y. Reality can be otherwise. Just as it would be impossible to understand the Crusades without reference to religion it would be impossible to understand the Crusades with reference only to religion. Wars don't get fought over religious ideals alone but over competitions for scarce resources. Eliminate all the religions in the world and our supply of clean water does not thereby grow, does it? Eliminating religion will not increase the labor market or put more food on the tables of people any more than making everyone adhere to this or that religious view will. While a Hitchens, perhaps, could try to make a case that atheisms become malignant when they are treated like religions (i.e. Stalinist purges) that is itself ultimately a variation of "no true Scotsman".
It's too easy to remind everyone else of the informal fallacy. Knowing what it is doesn't make us immune from leaning on it to rationalize our own team allegiances.
So there's some rumblings to the effect that a certain emergent leader handled a divorce badly. Mistakes were made that someone was grieved by and apologized for? Doesn't ... that ... sound kind of familiar? Back in 2013 when the plagiarism controversy erupted there were those advising against taking those who were leveling accusations in public against the successful minister seriously. There may still be people who think that Driscoll was somehow cyber-lynched rather than in some sense hoist with his own petard. If quoting Driscoll accurately, in context, and with meticulous citation was all it took for Wenatchee The Hatchet to get identified as a watchblog or Driscoll critic then the bar was set remarkably low. Wenatchee The Hatchet is a moderately conservative Reformed type and never really stopped being what would colloquially be identified as evangelical. It could have been easy to decide to do what too often happens at evangelical blogs and fret about the threats from outside. That didn't seem wise. What seemed more necessary was to document the problems within the team.
Would someone propose that it's bad form and bad theology to air the dirty laundry of the spiritual community? Ever read the Book of Judges, ever, even once in your life? Ever read even one of the prophetic books in the Bible? It's strange to think how blind an eye some people turn to internal critique when the critique may be directed at someone they really dig because internal critique is how the majority of the biblical books, especially in the Old Testament, ever got written to begin with.
At the risk of revisiting in quotes some things shared earlier (on September 25, 2014):
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/rachel-held-evans-suggests-six-ways.html
1. We must educate ourselves on how publishing and media industries work because the last year's worth of Driscoll scandals shine a light on how those industries may have made him a star to begin with.
2. An unstinting internal critique of the actions and ethics of people on "our" team is vital and must be sustained and maintained even if it is awkward and painful.
3. Identity politics as usual is not only not a way forward, it was one of the key reasons none of the last year's controversies did not come to light earlier. This needs to change.
4. The last year's worth of controversy are simultaneously a commendation and condemnation of the state of "Christian" journalism and associated punditry, but the alternative is not necessarily blogging or "just" blogging, but a reappraisal of our ethics and interests in the public sphere
5. Christians should not operate under the illusion that "our" heroes are not also capable of being monsters.
6. We should attempt to understand the scandals associated with Mark Driscoll as indicative of the crimes and passions we excuse or berate in our various heroes as a mirror to critique our own loyalties and ethics.
It's one thing for an Evans to write that we must protect people over reputations but it remains to be seen whether when the shoe's on the other foot that's what happens. Looks like we'll get to find out how this plays out.
Meanwhile, Wenatchee The Hatchet's thinking about revisiting some string quartets by Rochberg.
In general it seems that it doesn't matter what the team is. It could be Mark Driscoll or it could be Tony Jones or it could be John Yoder or Richard Dawkins or someone else. Someone says or does something incendiary and a defense can be made on the idea that whatever bad might be historically associated with X is because X wasn't really that way but was Y. Reality can be otherwise. Just as it would be impossible to understand the Crusades without reference to religion it would be impossible to understand the Crusades with reference only to religion. Wars don't get fought over religious ideals alone but over competitions for scarce resources. Eliminate all the religions in the world and our supply of clean water does not thereby grow, does it? Eliminating religion will not increase the labor market or put more food on the tables of people any more than making everyone adhere to this or that religious view will. While a Hitchens, perhaps, could try to make a case that atheisms become malignant when they are treated like religions (i.e. Stalinist purges) that is itself ultimately a variation of "no true Scotsman".
It's too easy to remind everyone else of the informal fallacy. Knowing what it is doesn't make us immune from leaning on it to rationalize our own team allegiances.
So there's some rumblings to the effect that a certain emergent leader handled a divorce badly. Mistakes were made that someone was grieved by and apologized for? Doesn't ... that ... sound kind of familiar? Back in 2013 when the plagiarism controversy erupted there were those advising against taking those who were leveling accusations in public against the successful minister seriously. There may still be people who think that Driscoll was somehow cyber-lynched rather than in some sense hoist with his own petard. If quoting Driscoll accurately, in context, and with meticulous citation was all it took for Wenatchee The Hatchet to get identified as a watchblog or Driscoll critic then the bar was set remarkably low. Wenatchee The Hatchet is a moderately conservative Reformed type and never really stopped being what would colloquially be identified as evangelical. It could have been easy to decide to do what too often happens at evangelical blogs and fret about the threats from outside. That didn't seem wise. What seemed more necessary was to document the problems within the team.
Would someone propose that it's bad form and bad theology to air the dirty laundry of the spiritual community? Ever read the Book of Judges, ever, even once in your life? Ever read even one of the prophetic books in the Bible? It's strange to think how blind an eye some people turn to internal critique when the critique may be directed at someone they really dig because internal critique is how the majority of the biblical books, especially in the Old Testament, ever got written to begin with.
At the risk of revisiting in quotes some things shared earlier (on September 25, 2014):
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/rachel-held-evans-suggests-six-ways.html
1. We must educate ourselves on how publishing and media industries work because the last year's worth of Driscoll scandals shine a light on how those industries may have made him a star to begin with.
2. An unstinting internal critique of the actions and ethics of people on "our" team is vital and must be sustained and maintained even if it is awkward and painful.
3. Identity politics as usual is not only not a way forward, it was one of the key reasons none of the last year's controversies did not come to light earlier. This needs to change.
4. The last year's worth of controversy are simultaneously a commendation and condemnation of the state of "Christian" journalism and associated punditry, but the alternative is not necessarily blogging or "just" blogging, but a reappraisal of our ethics and interests in the public sphere
5. Christians should not operate under the illusion that "our" heroes are not also capable of being monsters.
6. We should attempt to understand the scandals associated with Mark Driscoll as indicative of the crimes and passions we excuse or berate in our various heroes as a mirror to critique our own loyalties and ethics.
It's one thing for an Evans to write that we must protect people over reputations but it remains to be seen whether when the shoe's on the other foot that's what happens. Looks like we'll get to find out how this plays out.
Meanwhile, Wenatchee The Hatchet's thinking about revisiting some string quartets by Rochberg.
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