'Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking...'

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

I've wandered into a Stephen King novel. 
Did you ever have the feeling that something was fighting you, something you couldn't see? 

Yeah, you're right, that's crazy talk.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

just noodling about...

     Won't do a job that requires neckties. The damn things should only be worn at funerals to signify the absurdity of death. 

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Denys Turner on Julian of Norwich...

     Turner spins an argument that I find challenging, since for years I have been on the 'Scotist' side of that great divide about the 'necessity' of the Incarnation. In short, so the question goes, would the Second Person of the Trinity have become incarnate had Humanity not sinned? Mine has been a kind of 'soft Scotist' answer to that question, inasmuch as on the one hand I find it a bit pointless given that Humanity did in fact sin, while on the other hand I would never confess that the Fall took God by surprise. He had no need for an emergency remedy, yet the Incarnation is a remedy indeed.
     So, to Turner we go.
     'And the reason why Julian would appear to have less need of this Scotist distinction is that she has less trouble with seeing the Fall as behovely, because for her the divine end of self-disclosure in glorified humanity is most fully achieved precisely through the single complex event of the Fall and its remedy. Creation, Fall, and Redemption are all of a piece with one another, embodying in their conjunction the primary and only motive of the Incarnation.
     '...Within that providential act the Fall is indeed a crucial element, but not as if standing outside it and as if necessitating it causally. That, of course, was the principal burden of the example of the Lord and the Servant: Adam's fall and the falling of the divine Word into Mary's womb are one and the same falling. Hence Julian, unlike Scotus, has no need to distinguish between what God would have willed absolutely had human beings not in fact fallen, and a secondary motivation arising out of the fact that human beings did in fact do so. From all eternity "sin is behovely." That is all we can know as governing the Incarnation's necessity, because all you need to know by way of answering Anselm's question is that "it is a joy, a blisse, and endlesse liking to me that ever I sufferd passion for the[e]."'
     
   

bears repeating...


     '...it is never unequivocally clear who God is. The one for whom we live and die, whom we love or hate, who possesses us in our inmost being, yields the evidence. If this is so, then Christianity is not merely akin to conviction, even less a mere religious doctrine, or conversely a particular morality within a limited social sphere. Rather it is worldwide service in the discipleship of Jesus and in resistance to superstition. What is determinative is the tie to the Lord, who was crucified on Golgotha, ' Ernst Kasemann.

Friday, October 17, 2014

flee the madness while there's time!

     So, one sign that I should flee the Proper Job came in the form of an email to 'all employees', in which we were informed of an important update to company policies. Seems that twenty years is sufficient to earn four weeks of vacation. That's right, after twenty years, you can have your four weeks, but wait - don't try to take 'em all at once.
     What the hell? First you tell me I have to work on Sundays - which, mind you, contradicts what they told me at the interview - and now this? I mean, the hideous break room with the blaring television and the sea of dead eyes I can endure, sort of, but this manhandling of my time is beyond the pale. 

     Y'all fight so hard for these jahbs. Why? I'm happily returning to the world of independent contractors. Join me. It's harder at times, yes, and there is no job security to speak of, but you set your own hours, pay your own way to earning as much as you want (it's running a business you see), no one can legally bark orders at you, and you can take as much time off as you please. Walk toward the light, my friends, walk toward the light. 

Thursday, October 16, 2014

something from Dame Julian...

     'The blewhed of the clothyng betokenyth his stedfastnesse. The brownhed of his feyer face with the semely blackhede of the eyen was most accordyng to shew his holy sobyrnesse. The largnesse of his clothyng, whych was feyer, flammyng about, betokenyth that he hath beclosyd in hym all hevyns and all endlesse joy and blysse. And this was shewed in a touch, wher I saw that my understandyng was led in to the lorde, in whych I saw hym heyly enjoye for the worschypfull restoryng that he wyll and shall bryng hys servanunt to by hys plentuous grace,' Shewings XIV.51. 
     I now have a sign on the wall by the desk in my home office that reads DON'T BE PRUDENT. 
     Wisdom, let us attend.

things to do, people to annoy...

     Tomorrow morning I have a few things to do. First, I quit my job. Then, it's time for a lovely omelette at a diner that has the best iced tea as well. Perhaps I'll have the fried potatoes as well with some salt and pepper. That'll hit the spot. 

a concise definition of 'the Church thing'...


     You know, the weirder workings of the deus absconditus, and the hard to parse distinction between a simply and stupidly heretical coven, and the catholica hidden sub contrario, can drive a man to his wit's end. 

Monday, October 13, 2014

a proposal for Indigenous Peoples Day...

     Now, you might imagine that Indigenous Peoples Day is just another condescending project for bien pensant middling folk everywhere, a way for such middlers to find yet another use for people they know little about and care about even less. But you would be wrong. It is a chance for us to call to memory the forgotten history that has shaped our present just as assuredly as the Master Narrative cobbled by the victors. 
     On this auspicious Indigenous Peoples Day, let us celebrate the Aztec Empire. More specifically, let us celebrate the fall of the Aztec Empire. Seriously, two expansionist empires collided, and one fell as a result. What's more, the one that fell was based on slavery and human sacrifice. The larger empire that resulted was, it's true, based on slavery, but there was no human sacrifice. Quetzalcoatl was banished, and believe me, that was a good thing.

Want to be an Aztec? Behold your god.

     See? This is a fitting tribute on this Indigenous Peoples Day, one that will in no way fill any of us with a feeling of smug satisfaction at our own moral superiority. Go forth, dear reader, and hold high festival this year, remembering the fall of one of the most brutally omnivorous empires in the history of the world. 


television is good for you...

     So, yes, I indulged in some Classic Television, and for the first time in many a year spent a few hours watching Star Trek The Next Generation, and no, I did not come upon the lost episode where Wesley Crusher is tossed out an airlock. I did, however, watch quite a few episodes that featured the whimsical Q. I like Q. He's gleefully amoral, a kind of Dionysus manqué, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to run into such a being Out There. He's certainly more fun than the Captain, who, to my surprise, grates on me with his monotone moralism. None of this changes the fact that TNG is generally bad, mind you, and it reminds me that once upon a time I was baffled that no one ever made a movie centered on Q. O well, it's all history as they say. Tomorrow I go to my Proper Job, and will no longer have time to indulge in such ridiculous pursuits. That's sad. 

Columbus Day is really just a day off for most people, but whatever...

     On this fraught Columbus Day, let us speak of the ways we invest Columbus with symbolic significance, either as a hero or a villain, a significance he did not have in his own day. (The refashioning of Columbus as an Italian-American Hero, for instance, is both touching and pathetic.) Let's also take a cold, hard look at the ways we have transformed the Arawaks et al into Indigenous Peoples, of a uniform innocence and purity opposed to the grasping, violent Western Conquerers.   
     [Hypothesis: At some point the specter of Rousseau would appear, casting his shadow over all that came before him. Just a thought.]
     None of this is to suggest that Columbus was a particularly pleasant fellow, and it wouldn't surprise me if he was at once barely competent and ridiculously violent in the administration, so to speak, of his domain. But it's annoying all the same that there can be no dispassionate assessment of a rather complicated history. 
     For my part, this yearly masochistic thrashing of the guilty dead has bored me from the first time I encountered it at the university twenty-three years ago. Imagine a yearly fit of hand-wringing over the sacking of Rome in 410 by the Visigoths, or the conquest of North Africa by the Vandals. Our Columbus Festival, wherein we excoriate his memory to purge ourselves of the guilt of having been born on this side of history, is just as stupid. 

Sunday, October 5, 2014

why is it so dark in here?

     So here I am, looking around the ER offices. Seems the electricity has been cut off, so I need a flashlight to see all the cobwebs and the dust, the scattered papers and loose ceiling tiles. Looks like a pipe burst over there on the far wall. That'll cost me. O well, here I am, back to work, after quite a while away doing God only knows what.
     Really, a lot has happened since last your humble narrator saw fit to come to the office. My life has taken many turns, some for the better, some for the worst, some whose consequences remain to be seen. I have left one job and taken another. I have taken steps to return to graduate school, after many long dull boring years of talking about it, although it's nothing like any of us imagined. (For one thing, I'm not studying theology in grad school, not yet anyway.) More momentous to no one in particular is the simple fact that I have resolved the Church Thing, by not resolving it. Not to put too fine a point on it, I remain the strange Luthodox humbug you've known and loved since 2004, and the wife and I will be attending a Luderan parish.
     To the last, I refuse to be anyone's convert.
     O, and I've taken to reading Robert Jenson once again. It feels like the time to do so. I suspect the disagreements will remain. I just feel the need for something bracing and brilliant.
     Speaking of bracing and brilliant, Maximus the Confessor has taken up residence at Chez Hall, and I am quite enjoying the new edition of his Ambigua. I remain a heretic in despite of Luther's dismissal of Denys the Areopagite, and really don't see what the problem is. Also on deck is Edmund Schlink and Herman Broch, the later if I recall being no friend to the Reformation. So sad - he has important things to say about art and the limits thereof, things I need to revisit. I'm also reading Eksteins and Fussell. As what I predict will be a cold, damp Autumn winds down, I should have a look at the new book by Richard Hays, along with a few other things. Suffice it to say, we'll have a few things to write about in the coming months. 

     For now, though, I need to have someone clean this place up. It's a mess. 
     Peace out.