death is so proud...

     Huh. If you have a few minutes you don't mind losing to the void, do have a look at an essay entitled 'The Rationalist Way of Death.' 
     The first thing that I noticed is this: 'As for the business of seeing the body and saying goodbye, and the trouble and expense of coffins and flowers and funerals: what are they but relics of morbid superstitions that we should have got rid of centuries ago.' 
     Well, that busyness is a relatively recent growth; it's a growth industry in fact. All those superstitious centuries ago, no one bothered with any of that. As we've grown more and more sentimental, godless, and stupid, we've gussied up the funeral so that now it's really just an excuse for some branding and an upsell or three.

almost a movie review...

     So, as it turns out, Star Trek into Darkness isn't that good. It's full of provocative ideas, but ends up a muddle. 

hegel vs jason in hell, a freddie krueger film...

     It's particularly annoying to discover that the Trinitarian theology of Dumitru Staniloae is really just some warmed over Hegelian whimsy. Hegel Hegel Hegel - he's everywhere, can't get away from him.
     If you see Hegel walking toward you, you might attempt in vain to kill him, only to end up reflecting that your encounter with him as a Thou is a moment of Self-Reflection and thus Awakening to the Spirit, or some such. Hegel eludes me I'm afraid, so that's the best you'll get.
     The truth is, Hegel is like one of those ridiculous horror movie avatars, Jason or Freddie, who just will not die. Just when you think you've once and for all dismembered Hegel's silly arguments; just when you relax, weeping, in the happy thought that it's all over; Hegel at that moment will sit up in the background, turn toward you, and raise his hand to commence a lecture.
     Hegel will always be with us. Would Napoleon had never marched through Jena.

let us bow down and worship our leader...

     So, am I the only one disturbed by this icon?
     And an icon it is, dear reader. You see our Great Leader, read his Inspired Words, and can thrill in your communion with such Greatness, such Leaderliness. 
     That someone seems to have caught the Great Leaderly Leader in mid-speech is behovely my even kindred, for it is through his Powers of Eloquence that our Leaderly Leader Leads us to that North Star of, well, what? I forget just what that is, but he's going to Lead us there, and it will be good. 
     Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to speak with this nice fellow from the IRS.
     Peace out.

i wonder if oprah has interviewed him yet...

     So, it seems that Alain de Bottom succeeds in bringing Eros down to our middling world. This is hardly surprising, given that his other works and pomps - the ones I've bothered to try that is - are somewhere between boring and nonexistent. De Bottom is truly the Rob Bell of atheist middlebrow philosophes. 

'ford was a god who danced'...

     While talking with a friend a couple of hours ago, Henry Ford slithered into the conversation. We started talking about Ford, assembly lines, square dancing, and everything I said sounded rather, well, familiar. Then I realized that I was stealing without a pang of conscience themes from one of my favorite footnotes by the evil David Bentley Hart.* You know Hart, the jolly fellow who forgets his notes and always has a cold or some such condition when he gives a lecture, and who according to some wiseacres requires a Burning Bush and choirs of Seraphim to inform him that it would be good to brush his teeth. Anyway, without ado of any kind, here 'tis.

     'Nietzsche's avowed god, Dionysius, is of course an endlessly protean and deceptive deity and a wearer of many masks. When he makes his unannounced appearance at the end of Beyond Good and Evil, as its secret protagonist, whose divine irony has occultly enlivened its pages, he exercises his uniquely divine gift, the numinous privilege of veiling and unveiling, concealment and manifestation; he is the patron deity, appropriately, of the philosophical project of genealogy. But perhaps another veil remains to be lifted, and the god may be invited to step forth again, in his still more essential identity: Henry Ford. . . . And there could scarcely be a more vibrant image of univocity's perpetual beat of repetition - of eternal recurrence, the eternal return of the same - than the assembly line: difference here is certainly not analogical, but merely univocal, and the affirmation of one instance is an affirmation of the whole. It is, moreover, well documented that Ford was a devotee of square dancing, which is clearly akin to (perhaps descended from) the dithyrambic choreia of the bacchantes; Ford was a god who danced,' The Beauty of the Infinite, pg. 435.

*Yes, I have favorite footnotes. Doesn't everybody?

say No to mother's day...

     Why yes, I still hate Mother's Day, and avoid all churches everywhere for fear of being drowned in treacle and swinish sentiment. Let's squeeze out all the ambiguity, all the ways of going wrong in a family, so we can worship an image called, nowadays, Mom. And by all means, remind me of all the mothers who are still alive, who didn't die of cancer. Not that I wish they had died of cancer, no no no, it's just that I would rather have my real, flesh and blood, flawed and sometimes daft, yet for all that intelligent survivor of a mother alive and well thank you very much.
     But hey, we'll sure spend a lot on useless crap and brunches, so this might help this quarter's growth. See, God really does bring Good from Evil.
     So, to recap - loved my mother; hate, hate, hate Mother's Day. Don't even get me started on Father's Day.

dum dee dee dum dum dum dee dee...

     Just spent an hour and a half analyzing an insurance adjuster's estimate. It was so, so wrong. 
     Don't envy me because my life is a rich, full oyster.

a brief note on Anselm...

     This passage tells you why almost everyone is wrong about Anselm's Cur Deus Homo:

     'You are not drawing a proper distinction, it seems to me, between, on the one hand, what Christ did because of the demands of his obedience, and, on the other, the suffering, inflicted upon him because he maintained his obedience, which he underwent even though his obedience did not demand it' [emphasis added for emphasis].

     Anselm goes to great lengths to unwind this, and his unwinding is not without fault, but really now, I don't see any kind of theory of atonement in the work, let alone one where the Father intentionally inflicts pain and suffering on the Son (pain and suffering being distinct).
     Then again, I'm not looking for one.

is this a 'blurb'?

     Just listened to this lecture by one Dr. Charles Stang, wherein he tells us about his study Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite. The book sounds cool, but there is a problem - apophasis is not primarily about negation. Negation is a means, a method, occasioned by excess. Perhaps he addresses that in the book. We'll see.

i interpret the daily news - a lazy, cross-platform post, edited for prime-time...

     At the moment we are dazzled by an appealing nihilism - jouissance, s'il vous plaît, à l'intérieur du rien sans nôtre Créateur. (Couldn't help it; hope the French isn't too appalling for y'all.) We have yet to plumb the depths of the Nothing from which God summoned us into being. Over the top? I don't think so, but then again I have a secret stash of Existentialist nonsense in the attic. 
     Seriously, that bastard Sartre has truly trickled down on us all. We are deluded that doing precedes being, and that 'knowing is a modality of having', and not a modality of loving - the catastrophic consequences of which we see all around us. We imagine that we ourselves summon ourselves out of the Nothing by acts of sheer will. So no amount of constant surveillance, no reckless sexual self-immolations, not even the complete commodification of the human person, can possibly trouble us, as we have no nature, no being, to damage by such pervasive assaults. Such a commercialized police state as seems inexorably aborning can be spun thus as a good, for it will ratify our voluntarist self-creation at every discreet moment. 
     There you have our most radical manifestation of Sin yet, and we here in the ruins of the West at least seem to be enjoying it all far too much for simple greed, or lust, or any particular deadly sin to be our motivation. Money, the accumulation of stuff for its own sake, is merely one means to this End. One can as easily be a Sojourners reading Jim Wallis acolyte as a hoarder of money - it's All The Same.

well that was stupid...

     I indulged in a few slices of pizza a few hours ago. 
     Apparently that was a mistake. 
     Twenty years ago I could eat five pizzas between midnight and one in the morning and sleep soundly until five the next day. Not that I ever did that. No, that would be wrong, very, very wrong. 
     Anyway, as I said, I seem to have made a mistake. So I'm up. Break out the acid reducer and a book - it's a party.

     Been reading the news. I'm now sad, and sick at heart. I need some Julian of Norwich. And tea, lots and lots of tea.

gitmo comes to the heartland?

     I am truly terrified at the thought of some kind of 'Gitmo North', located in Illinois of all places. (Then again, why not there?) That could be the first island in our very own Gulag Archipelago. 
     But hey, that's crazy talk. This is a Progressive President, and we all know how liberal Progressives are.

the alexandrian thug stops by...

     A little something for the fun of it:

     'Therefore, Christ has given his own body for the life of all, and through it he makes life dwell in us again. How he does this I will explain as I am able. Since the life-giving Word of God has taken up residence in the flesh, he has transformed it so that it has his own good attribute, that is, life. And since, in an ineffable mode of union, he has rendered it life-giving, just as he himself is by nature. For this reason, the body of Christ gives life to those who participate in it. His body drives out death when that body enters those who are dying, and it removes decay since it is fully pregnant with the Word who destroys decay,' Cyril of Alexandria.

Eucharist, my friends, it's called Eucharist, and it's good for what ails us.

nothing new under the sun...

     'Many of them introduced numerous families of uncertain deities and, imagining that the male and female sex was present in the divine natures, spoke about the birth and the successions of gods from gods. Others proclaimed that there were greater or lesser gods and gods differing in power. Some asserted that there was no God at all and venerated only that nature which came into existence through accidental movements or collisions. A great many declared in accordance with popular belief that there was a God, but asserted that this same God had no concern or interest in human affairs. Some, however, worshiped those corporeal and visible forms of created things themselves in the elements of earth and heaven. Lastly, certain individuals placed their goes in the images of man, animals, beasts, and serpents, and confined the God of the universe and the Author of infinity within the narrow limits of metals, stones, and genealogies,' Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate I.4.
     We do indeed seem to have been spinning in place for millennia, and all those fashionable heresies and every kind of idolatry, and the nihilism of atheism itself, have always been with us, and always will be until the end of the end times. 

take and read...

     'A Medieval model of education stresses the importance of learning by way of imitation; that imitation is part of classical education might seem obvious, rote, however more is at stake in imitation than first meets the eye. Imitation is the desire to share being, to see as the other sees, to create as the other creates, to be as the other has being. Imitation sits at the center of Christian theosis and ethics; “Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ,” writes Paul. The Christian who imitates Christ has become like Christ; we may not become like Christ unless we imitate Him. We come to know Christ through His imitation, through seeing the world as Christ sees, through the intuitive act of being Christ as we are ourselves. We do not plunder Christ, neither do we plunder Paul. Jesus Christ was crucified in the flesh; no series of tenets and methods and techniques was crucified on your behalf.'
     He's on to something.

just stunning...

     'At $72.8 Trillion, Presenting The Bank With The Biggest Derivative Exposure In The World (Hint: Not JPMorgan)'. 
     
     What the f*&(^(& f(&??! 

more on the cabal at calvinist international...

     As you may have noted, dear reader, I have had it up to here with the kids at Calvinist International. At one time I thought it a fairly scholarly endeavor, one that was honorable even if wrong-headed at times. Even then, when I thought it wrong-headed, I remained in denial and wrote that off to the inevitable disagreements I would have with any devoted and traditionalist-minded Reformed gaggle. Now, I see it as sinister posturing, with a thinly veiled political agenda that would make one shudder were it not so patently absurd.
      Put simply, for all their talk of freedom and the like, the kids at CI are prepping us for totalitarianism, plain and simple. This is difficult to discern because they seem to believe in all sincerity that somehow we can resurrect the office of the Christian Magistrate who benevolently oversees a pluralist kingdom where disputes on matters of morals and political moment are adjudicated on the basis of a commonly accepted norm of natural reason. All the while, of course, the Christian Magistrate is also keen to manage the affairs of the various churches in all their diversity. That diversity itself is a result of the fact that the Church is fundamentally invisible, a crudely Platonic affair, with each particular congregation a fragment manifesting perhaps a shadow of that True Invisible Church.
     To further this agenda, Steven Wedgeworth has recourse to the old cliché that the Church in the first centuries was in essence fissiparous and chaotic. This hoary notion, dear to Mainline revisionists and Fundamentalists alike, is both stupid and easily refuted. I mean, is it not clear that there was always a firm, clear proclamation of the Trinitarian Gospel starting at Pentecost? That this was contested, pressured, marginalized, hounded, misunderstood, understood variously by different bishops and the like - that, in short, the Church lived in real human history - is both a fact, and trivial. 
     This reminds me of the time he dismissed Cyril of Alexandria on the basis of a passage from Clement of Alexandria taken out of context and then read as tendentiously as possible. This represents a movement in a larger critique of patristic Christology, which again is nothing new in revisionist circles, nor is the practice of noting that then, as now, there was a riot of people writing theology of one stripe or another and declaring, on that basis, that there was no essential unity to the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. That there is a complimentary fantasia about that Early Church hovering blameless and unscathed above the sublunary world does not sanction a shoddy and manipulative reading of the first few centuries of the Church's history. 
     So, what are the implications of all this?
     The distinctively, shall we say, English form of Fascism thus constituted on the basis of Locke and Grotius and Hobbes, unopposed by a Church crippled by doctrinal skepticism and thus lacking the institutional weight to stand against the State thus constituted, would be of a soft, almost yielding sort, but it would be a form of public ideological and ecclesial micromanagement all the same. (As an aside, how folks can miss the totalitarian implications of Locke's thought in particular, both his political thought and its foundational epistemology, is a mystery not to be plumbed this side of the eschaton.)
     Again, this would be terrifying were it not pure fantasy. As much as they hate the word, we are living in apocalyptic times. The Church is shrinking both in terms of numbers and in terms of influence in this Northern Hemispherical Nightmare so fast it's like watching a time-elapsed film. In the South, persecution is rampant - show me the benevolent Christian Magistrate in Nigeria, or the Sudan. Christians are fleeing, or being killed, throughout the historic homes of the faith in the Levant and around the Mediterranean. As soon as the Vatican is sacked, and Mt Athos annexed by the EU, the game will be over. To come closer to home, when you face, inter alia, militants who know they're killing children for convenience and profit, and think it a virtuous act, some sort of Lockean bastardization of Thomist natural reason will not save you. To my ear you have no choice but to bring out the howitzers of prophetic denunciation and ascetic prayer and fasting. 
     Finally, each of them, Escalante in particular, have mistaken their personal idiosyncratic tics for the foundations of a movement. It is a movement, moreover, that has shown itself to be without honor and intellectual integrity. It saddens me to say that, my friends, because I had high hopes for so many of those involved. 

speaking of Origen...

Here you go:

Father Sergius...

     Fr Sergius is indeed a kind of modern Origen - brilliant, combative, insanely erudite, visionary, occasionally daft, and intoxicated by Jesus. I don't know that either of 'em are heretics in the strict sense, though they do go rogue in the more speculative flights. Those flights, though, are offered in service to the Church of Jesus Christ, and thus motivated by love and not a desire to divide the Body. So, all in all, I'd say they're both great servants of the Church. When and if they erred, they did so for the right reasons. I wish all of us had the intellectual, moral, and spiritual courage and ardor these two Fathers manifest in even their minor works.

i can't work a cute reference to 'Hart' into the title...

     I know little enough of James K A Smith, except that he's at Calvin College and writes books on vaguely philosophical topics. To be completely open here, I've never been able to read more than a paragraph by the man without drifting into a fitful sleep punctuated by bad socialist dreams.

     I also have little concern with staying within the Reformed tradition. Of course, whether the positions taken by those at Calvinist International are fair representations of the Reformed Tradition in its fullness is debatable. In any event, they have of late gotten into what was at first an amusing tangle with one David Bentley Hart, a tangle in which they have the losing part. As a result, one Peter Escalante has doubled down repeatedly as he tries with more and more obvious vanity to win a rhetorical and philosophical battle that is beyond him. 

    I will not take up Hart's defense. Suffice it to say, I don't always agree with Hart, but in this case I think he has the better part. In fact, it's not clear to me that Hart isn't having some fun with this tempest in a thimble. He has obviously baited his opponents, offering the most exaggerated statements mixed in with his more cogent arguments, and those guys have just as obviously taken the bait. Escalante in particular seems to be witlessly and pointlessly misreading Hart.  
     Does Escalante really imagine that Hart would assert 'that apocalyptic theopanies are somehow required in order to understand that jumping off a bridge is a bad idea'? Or that jumping off a bridge is, in terms of discernment, the same as making judgments about fraught moral matters amongst communities that have received decades of false catechesis? (Make no mistake, one needn't go to any kind of church to receive catechesis in matters of morals and what we might loosely call theology, inasmuch as all people have their gods, whatever they call 'em). 

     Oh well. I offer the following rambling yet mercifully brief reflection on this now tedious affair.

     It's not so obvious that a narrowly construed Aristotelian-Thomist understanding of natural revelation, and thus natural law, is representative of the larger catholic tradition of thought in these matters. (Note well that I didn't say anything specific about Thomas or Aristotle; we're dealing with a specific school of interpretation here, one that is myopic and philosophically daft.) 

     This is relevant because the mission of Calvinist International implies that they seek to offer the broadest possible consensus in matters of doctrine and philosophy. Again, they explicitly assert that the Reformed tradition, at its best, represents this 'mere Christianity', a catholic consensus capable of uniting diverse Christians through an irenic approach to matters often made divisive. 

     Of course, it remains to be demonstrated by anything they've said or done that the Reformed tradition, and the particular construal of it they find convincing, is itself that consensus, that 'mere Christianity' all of us need. As an assumption it hardly holds water; it must be demonstrated through both historical and dogmatic argument. Without such an argument, folks like me who stand outside the Reformed tradition in general, and CI's particular place within that tradition, have no reason to listen to 'em. 

     Of course, here we get at the crux of their polemics in this running skirmish - on what ground of consensual 'reason' can we meet to hash this out? I don't agree that 'natural knowledge' and 'reason' are quite what CI makes 'em out to be. But of course, that's because I'm being unreasonable. Perhaps I'm even a Kierkegaardian who imagines that all truth is ultimately subjective (for the Dane, that was an attempt to salvage particular subjectivity from the ravages of the Hegelian system; whether he succeeded is another matter), and therefore an inward something not subject to public scrutiny and argument. Perhaps I delight in imaginary apocalypticalist phenomenologies. Maybe I believe in faeries in the forest. Certainly I deny the givenness of the transcendentals of being, Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, and their convertibility. (The fact that I, like Hart, have spent years writing about that can not be allowed to play any part in the skirmish at hand.) 

     Perhaps I'm overdoing it, but I doubt it, because it's precisely such nonsense that has dominated the essays on CI.

     The fact is that Hart's position grows out of a larger construal of the truly catholic than the folks at Calvinist International seem able to grasp. This does not make Hart always and ever right in all his particulars; again, I would never say that. It does mean, however, that the assumptions and inferences and arguments he offers have sailed right past Escalante in particular. For example, at the end of Hart's latest piece, one can discern a deeply contested sort of Eastern Orthodox understanding of the relation between the creature and its Creator. 

     You see, there is more to the catholic tradition than is dreamt of by the editors of Calvinist International. Were they as truly interested in forging a consensus, a kind of mere Christianity that could unite more than it divides, they would have to reckon with this, however uncomfortable it made 'em. Instead, they attack it from a position poised on the most narrow kind of Reformed theology and philosophy. Again, that is their prerogative, but to build on that foundation is not to return to classical sources of Christian wisdom; it is to burnish a particular tradition that reads selected classical sources such as the Summa and the like in a particular, not to mention peculiar, manner. 

the progressive left...

     Has there ever been a more detailed, more rigid, more insidious code of behavior and speech than that used by the Progressive Left to manipulate others into submission? They're the most moralistic band of killjoys.
     I've also had occasion to note the Progressive Left's murderous embrace of eugenics and general Malthusian principles. Now it seems they are growing more militarist even as they embrace the nihilism of the agenda behind the movement for so-called 'marriage equality'. 
     This bothers me, as I have friends on that side of the divide. Those connections are difficult, because silence in the face of these horrors demonstrates tacit complicity.

     More and more it's my experience that those who say they want 'peace', 'concord', 'open conversation', 'reason', and the like are poseurs who only want to beat others into submission.

the communion of the saints...

     I just like this:

May Brigid bless the house wherein you dwell
Bless every fireside, every wall and floor;
Bless every heart that beats beneath its roof;
And every tongue and mind for evermore;
Bless every hand that toils to bring joy
And every foot that walks its portals through.
This is my wish today, my constant prayer
May Brigid bless the house that shelters you.

     Don't worry. It's not like I believe the saints are, you know, alive in Christ. Rank heresy that is! No, they're dead and gone, and it's best we don't try and talk with 'em or otherwise disturb their deadness.

nothing new under the sun...

Lamarck:Darwin::Pelagius:Augustine. QED.

a revision...

Wherein We Prepare for Another Apocalypse



I fear those who hope, on bended knee,
to reap an Eden sopped with morning dew.
Call it, year zero for the happy few:
against this dream how can we hold a plea –
the merely human’s worth less than a flea
when Utopia calls, so let’s come clean, we knew
all along that there could be no place
in that nice world for such a fragile race.

working, working...

     So, I just sent off a submission of poems to Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry via their website. Now the waiting begins. Over the next week, I have seven more submissions to variously send through the web or regular mail. For now, having written several lines of poetry, and done this one submission, I think a break is in order. Time for a walk.
     Peace out.

a poem...

Fortunate Fall



A faulty memory’s not fit to amuse
us, when we need a means to slip away
into a dream of all the good we may
or may not dare. For we yet hate to lose,
shambling and resentful of the news
that loss is woven into every play
we make. The sun yet burns us, as we weigh
the odds that love’s an everlasting ruse.
It's like a dream, this memory undone.
The hour's not as early as I thought,
yet I bear the remnant of our love
for a garden City lost, then won -
a fugitive law presses from above
that we might be more dearly bought.

a poem...

Reply to Thomas Hardy

And it’s strange to say, my friend,
     that all that is is forged through chance
accretions, changes lacking all
     completion, formal happenstance - 

more likely, is it not, that chance,
     in all it’s variations, forms
return upon return, until
     each thing to its end conforms.

an untitled poem...

For now I haven't got a thing to say
with all this blank verse stretched before me,
so how about we set aside today
at least our passion for the kill, and flee
that coming wrath we all sense at our heels
while claiming that's just how oblivion feels.

working at poetry...

     Just spent a few happy hours revising poems, some of them quite old. One of 'em goes back to the Spring of 1998. 
     There is a simple satisfaction in knowing one has done the job at hand.

a ramble with no purpose...

     I'm over, inter alia, Mad Men; Game of Thrones; Iron Chef America, Top Chef, and any of their ilk; movies based on comic books; zombies; vampires (sorry Joss, but you're partly to blame); the new, super-popular Rush; the LCMS, PCA, OPC, ELCA, PC(USA), UCC, ACNA, LCNA, UMC, LCWS, ECUSA, REC, AAC, and I'm eyeing the OCA; Rand Paul (should have stayed On Message there big guy); Libertarians in general; Democrats, Republicans, and other Stupid Liberals; Peter Jackson; Wendell Berry.
     I still love Firefly, but wish the fans would get over it. And no, we're not Browncoats. 
     Justified is currently about the best thing on television. 
     Well, there's Top Gear, but that's a different kettle of widgets. 
     Yes, I still love television. There are more television shows in my iTunes rack than movies. I would love to write for television. Perhaps there's an opening for a slightly more Rightish Aaron Sorkin. 
     No, I didn't really think so.
     I would like to write a book on Hell entitled Love Wins. That would also be a fine title for a book about Augustine's fine-spun theology of predestination. Put a contract in front of me and I might just sign the thing.
     Rob Bell is an excellent writer of ad copy. I was going to say that he should be in marketing, but thought better of it for some reason.
     I'm both an Old Earth and a Young Earth Creationist. Sue me. 
     I've long had my doubts that there was ever anything like Feudalism. If we made up Feudalism out of our own pure brains, then I do much wonder why. Riddle me why we invented Feudalism, and you'll untangle the skein tightly wound in the last two and a half centuries or more. You might also win a grant.
     I'm tired, yet all I want to do is watch television and eat ice cream. 
     That would be stupid, so of course I would never do it. 
     Peace out.
     
     

psa...

     You know, 'Moon Mist' is as lovely as anything by, say, Stravinsky or Debussy. 

psa...

     Our music this evening is 'Mood Indigo' by one Duke Ellington.