Thinking About ...

... the corresponding moral imaginations of Woody Allen and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Here's Woody's Isaac talking with Yale in Manhattan:

YALE: I'm not a saint, OK?

ISAAC: You're too easy on yourself. Don't you see?

You're... You rationalise everything. You're not honest with yourself.

You talk about you wanna write a book, but in the end you'd rather buy a Porsche.

You cheat a little bit on Emily and you play around the truth with me.

The next thing you know you're in front of a Senate committee naming names.

YALE: You are so self-righteous. I mean, we're just people. We're just human beings.

You think you're God!

ISAAC: I gotta model myself after someone.

You just can't live the way you do. It's all so perfect.

Jesus, what are future generations gonna say about us? My God!

You know, someday we're gonna be like him. [pointing to the skeleton of a caveman in the room]

And he was probably one of the beautiful people, dancing and playing tennis.

And now look. This is what happens to us.

You know, it's important to have some kind of personal integrity. I'll be hanging in a classroom one day and I wanna make sure when I thin out that I'm... well thought of.

And here is a monologue from Isaac near the end of the film, shortly after the scene above:



And here's Dostoyevsky's Ivan speaking to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov:

I've been sitting here now, and do you know what I was saying to myself? If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment--still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all! ....

There is still an awful lot of centripetal force on our planet, Alyosha. I want to life, and I do live, even if it be against logic. Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one's heart, out of old habit. Here, they've brought your fish soup -- help yourself. It's good fish soup, they make it well. I want to go to Europe, Alyosha, I'll go straight from here. Of course I know that I will only be going to a graveyard, but to the most, the most precious graveyard, that's the thing! The precious dead lie there, each stone over them speaks of such ardent past life, of such passionate faith in their deeds, their truth, their struggle, and their science, that I -- this I know beforehand -- will fall to the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them -- being wholeheartedly convinced, at the same time, that it has all long been a graveyard and nothing more. And I will not weep from despair, but simply because I will be happy in my shed tears. I will be drunk with my own tenderness. Sticky spring leaves, the blue sky -- I love them, that's all! Such things you love not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts, you love your first young strength.

Thinking About ...

... the preservation of the Incarnation in the mystery of the Ascension.

The Resurrection was a bodily resurrection.

The Ascension was no less a bodily ascension.

There's a deep mystery in there somewhere about the presence of Christ in the Cosmos linking the Creation, the Image of God in Man, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Ascension and the Triumphal Return in one great Story.

Thinking About ...

... the role of hope in the Christian vision for the world.

Something came up in my global issues course the other day as we discussed the AIDS crisis in Zimbabwe. The young lady giving presentation pointed out that without adequate treatment options, of the biggest causes of the spread of HIV is that those who are infected take an "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow I die" attitude. This would, of course, be interrupted if they told their sexual partners that they had AIDS and some don't even go to get tested for this reason.

We started talking about the fact that monogamy - a tenet of basic Christian morality - would end the AIDS crisis in one or two generations.

But one student asked a probing question, "Yea, so you can tell someone who doesn't have AIDS, 'Don't have sex with more than one partner or you'll get AIDS and die,' but what are we are Christians supposed tell the person who already has aids and is already going to die?"

Thinking About...

... the Kingdom of God as community, culture, society, city and institution.

Thinking About ...

... the adjective "biblical." What, if anything, is gained by using this - or it's more common sister "unbiblical" - to describe a thought, principle or practice?

Just For Fun

Thinking about my "Thinking About..." I ran across this:

"Twenty One Ways You Might Be an Evangelical"

For those of us with at least a measure of self-deprecating humor.

:-)

Thinking About...

... whether or not the word 'evangelical' isn't perhaps wearing itself out, starting to feel, as Bilbo would put it, "like ... butter scraped over too much bread."

Thinking About ...

... the sophisticated theological aesthetics of C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces.

Thinking About ...

The power of Jesus's authority in Luke 19

When he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, saying, "Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, Why are you untying it? you shall say this: 'The Lord has need of it.'"

So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them. And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, Why are you untying the colt? And they said, "The Lord has need of it."

Maybe this is the key to living in the power and authority that he has passed on to us, being able to say boldly, "The Lord has need of it."

Thinking About ...

... whether or not this striking note from John 6, "Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, in number about five thousand,"

has anything to do with images like "He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters" (Psalm 23) and other such pastoral imagery of YHWH from the Old Testament.

Thinking About ...

... the durability of being and the Scholastic associations between substance, time and space.



OK ... I get paid to do this. It's my job.

This "Thinking About..." was from a conversation in my 12th grade Humane Letters class yesterday and the other two sprung out of our faculty seminar discussion of Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club. So it may not be cooking but I am bringing home the bacon - the Francis Bacon that is. And, honestly, I can hardly believe that I found a way to get paid to do this. What a blessed vocation.

Speaking of cooking ... wonderful homemade French Onion Soup awaited my homecoming last night. Wow!

Thinking about...

... metaphysics versus metanarratives.

Thinking About ...

... Pragmatism, Post-Modernism and Presuppositional Apologetics

Thinking About ...

... the sunlight during the golden hour.

Thinking About ...

... how writing and books began the process of removing information from realm of the memory and placing it in outside of the human person, and how the internet and a hand held or implanted device might complete that process.

Thinking About ...

... nothing more or less than the crunch of the snow beneath my feet in the -20 degree air.

Thinking About ...

... theological aesthetics and sense of wonder anew in light of Josef Pieper's desire to re-integrate intellectus and ratio as articulated in his Leisure, the Basis of Culture.

Of Blogs and Books

OK, 22 Words has done it again.

I understand that for some reason it is necessary to make short paragraphs on blog posts.

I also understand that this doesn't necessarily mean that people who read blogs can't read books with long paragraphs.

But... I do really fear for the future of the older classics in this new culture of techno-literacy. As people become more and more accustomed to shorter paragraphs, twitter content, IM, etc., I fear they will have completely unsuited themselves for Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hugo ... even Steinbeck.

If this happens on a large scale, I do not think it will be a failure of education, desire or inteligence, simply a matter of habit and conditioning. That's what scares me the most. It's so easy.

And then what? As Morissey might say: "Come armageddon!
Come, armageddon! come!"

Unfortunately, only a couple days after that post on short paragraphs in blogs, I found some of these very fears disturbingly realized reading the comments of 22 Words's fairly literate readership in response to the question, "Are there any good books you don't like?"

Dickens used to appear in the newspapers for crying out loud! Now he appears on lists of books that fairly literate people couldn't get through.

It's almost enough to make me drop out altogether, like one twentieth century writer, thinker, and human being I admire an awful lot.

Thinking About ... Three Types of Boredom ...

... another 22 Words inspired set of distinctions.

Abraham Piper raised the question, "Whose fault is it if you're bored?"

I think I would make the following distinction before answering the question.

You could think of 'boredom' as a simple an emotional state, an emotional state that could arise from any number of complex or interrelated causes. Like anger, boredom in this sense is not be blameworthy in and of itself.

There is another type of boredom, however, that is more deep seated. It's a way of being in the world. Call it 'ennui' if you like. This boredom is a fundamental disposition of the human person towards other people, the Cosmos, and maybe even the Creator. This second type of boredom is certainly blameworthy and, what's worse, potentially deadly to the soul. It is the opposite of openness to being. It is a corrosive evil.

Finally, a third type of boredom might arise simply from living passively in a technological, consumerist, info-tainment based culture. This 'boredom' is neither a blameless emotional state nor a corrosive disposition of the soul but a simple habit, a habit acquired through allowing your interest to be too often spoon fed you. As it becomes more pervasive, it amounts to a failure to rouse oneself from the slumber of being entertained by the World to the responsibility for creative, dynamic engagement in the created Cosmos. It's laziness at best, 'soul sleep' before death at worst.

It seems to me that I should keep this in mind not only for myself but also in my child rearing. What I do with my own boredom and how I handle my children's occasional announcement, "I'm bored," should be shaped by a discerning attitude towards the root and extent of that boredom. Because if these distinctions hold, it would be a grave mistake in every direction to treat all boredom alike.

Thinking About ....

... the difference between idleness and leisure.