NORTHAMPTON, MA—Three days after burying his beloved labrador retriever, Daniel MacNeil, 9, was told about doggy heaven and hell by his fourth-grade teacher, Sister Doris Behnke. “Don’t cry, Daniel. I’m sure Shiner was a very good doggy,” Behnke told the mourning child Tuesday. “He’s probably in Doggy Heaven right now, running through its big green fields and chasing squirrels. Only disobedient doggies who chew on the furniture or lift their legs on the carpet will burn in the eternal, white-hot kennel fires of Doggy Hell.” (From The Onion)
Catholic child told about doggy heaven, doggy hell
04.25.03 | Permalink | 14 Comments
Religious humanists & public intellectuals after the fall of New Babel
04.25.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Religious humanists & public intellectuals after the fall of New Babel
Gregory Wolfe writes of post-Christian public intellectuals in the introduction to the essay collectionThe New Religious Humanists:
Despite the harshness of our cultural climate, a new generation of religious humanists is making its presence known. Many of the most dynamic of these thinkers were born a generation after the ones that experienced the divisiveness of the 1960s. While these younger thinkers care passionately about the issues at the heart of the culture wars, they seek a less apocalyptic and political role for religion. To a great extent they draw their inspiration from the first wave of twentieth-century religious humanists, who were assimilators rather than warriors, but there is a difference. Whereas thinkers like T.S. Eliot could still rely on a social order in which religion was entrenched, contemporary thinkers face a cultural situation that can only be described as post-Christian. This has given rise to a whole new series of cultural and intellectual approaches.
Too bad none of them wrote for his book. Though the book contains essays by such notables as Kathleen Norris and Richard Rodriguez, few of them are post-Christian–though they seem to recognize the present cultural situation deems Christianity less than central. For all the talk of “new cultural and intellectual approaches,” Leon Kass’ essay on Babel might as well have been written in the 1920s. Most of the authors have endowed university chairs, not yet the purview of “thinkers [who] were born a generation after the ones that experienced the divisiveness of the 1960s,” certainly not six years ago when the collection was published. Though I don’t have birthdays in front of me, I’m guessing all the authors experienced the 1960s. This is the same demographic drawn like a moth to flame to the American Life TV promo with this dialogue:
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“A harrowing experience…”
04.24.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on “A harrowing experience…”
har·row \har-‘õ\ n : a cultivating tool that has spikes, spring teeth, or discs and is used esp. to pulverize and smooth the soil
Helen Phares Hunter, 1916-2003
04.20.03 | Permalink | 2 Comments
Continuing our venerable family tradition, my grandmother died early this Easter morning. Her husband died ten or fifteen years ago, exactly one month after Christmas. My other grandfather died on New Years Eve, and my other grandmother died the day after Christmas.
She moved from Nebraska to an Oklahoma dairy farm when she was a girl, where she learned to say “creek” instead of “brook.” Her older brothers soon left for California, in hopes of escaping the Dust Bowl and becoming extras in a Hemingway novel.
She met my grandfather Clarence while he was riding around in his friend’s car one afternoon. After they had five children (four of whom survived) and outlasted the Dust Bowl and World War II, she convinced him to move out of Grady County (and such locales as Chickasaw and Ninekah) into Bethany, then a distant suburb of Oklahoma City. They bought the last house in Bethany that still had chickens and cattle in the back yard. My grandfather started working in the lumber yard for his cousin. My grandmother started her long years of working for department stores. And my pre-pubescent father spent the summer pulling up all the posts and chicken wire in the back yard. She saw to it that the house was painted her favorite color: green.
When she was well into her thirties, Clarence bought Helen a wedding ring, jealous of imaginary ne’er-do-wells stalking the department store hoping to pick up my grandmother. The two oldest children were married and moved to Texas. The two youngest got married and moved to different ends of Bethany. In retirement she took to making afghans with increasingly unique color schemes while Clarence continued to edge the yard with a hoe and tried to tell stories without my grandmother correcting his exagerrations. (“Now, Clarence…”)
She is survived by four children, twelve grandchildren, and fifteen great-grandchildren. One grandson, upon learning that grandmother never cooked with sugar–a habit that was never broken by mere recipes–decided to ask her to make french fries instead, which she gladly did every Friday when he came over for lunch from the nearby high school. Her children remained sharply divided over the merits of her mince meat pie; she brought two every Thanksgiving.
I last saw her two weeks ago in Baptist Hospital in Oklahoma City. She had just had major abdominal surgery to repair her small intestine. While there, she was diagnosed with progressed Alzheimer’s, an ailment that managed to find both her brothers in California too.
When I came into her room, she stared at me as though she didn’t recognize me. My father looked at her and said, “Look who came to see you all the way from Atlanta.” She looked at me for the longest time, and then looked back at my dad and smiled. “Doesn’t he work?” she asked.
Later that week, I was teasing her about not running away with any of the cute male nurses–at least not until I had checked them out first. She stuck her tongue out at me. We listened to some music together on my laptop, and when I showed her the animation of Dubya dancing along to the music she laughed.
When I left Oklahoma City to return to Atlanta, she winked at me.
Clothes make the psychiatric patient
04.16.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Clothes make the psychiatric patient
Crazy Tracy is at it again. Nurse to the emotionally gifted, Crazy Tracy matches up your favorite psychiatric diagnoses with their unique fashion sense.
And what about depression, my personal favorite? Well, we don’t care, really. Bathing, dressing, personal hygiene–just so much unnecessary trouble. C’mon, it’s not like we’re going to get out of bed!
Most curious to me was the concurrence of clown makeup with female bipolars. Hadn’t noticed this; I’ll have to keep my eyes out. So does this mean Jan Crouch is bipolar or what?
Still thinking about graduate school in the humanities?
04.14.03 | Permalink | 9 Comments
The Invisible Adjunct continues to persuade me that a PhD in the humanities is a bad idea. Well, shit.
Having already gone through the ardors of a useless graduate professional degree, I know all too well what risks are involved in entering a PhD program. Unlike academia, my former field (divinity) is well aware of its “recidivism rates” and the danger of having mostly second career applicants. It’s aware, but it’s yet to do anything, even as it bemoans the return of genteel poverty for the clergy, a career path that once promised a comfortable middle class life. And even though most seminaries don’t care that they contribute to the problem–tuition pays the bills, after all–they at least know that they should care and wish that they did.
Not so with the humanities. It seems critique only comes from the edges. Perhaps its because many academics are stuck in the synthetic-conventional and individuative-reflective stages of development (wholly adolescent stages, by the way). Perhaps the absence of a tradition of prophetic self-critique is to blame. Perhaps only shits get tenure. I don’t know.
The Invisible Adjunct writes that
…if you have the passion and the interest to stick it out and finish the degree, you will probably also experience a kind of unalienated labour. You’re not punching a time clock and putting in X number of hours to earn X number of dollars. No, no, you have your “work,” and your work becomes an important part of who you are. You will develop and deeply internalize an identity as someone who does/as someone who is this work.
In theology, a principle part of prophetic critique is the knocking down of idols. Liberal modernist theologian Paul Tillich defined idolatry as the elevation of objects of (however) limited concern to the place of ultimate concern. Insofar as idols cause harm and take on a life of their own, they can be described as demonic. (Aside from the fact that “idolatry” and “demonic” are scary God words, they can be used quite effectively by a/theists such as myself.)
Perhaps one idol of the humanities is the myth of unalienated labor. In my charismatic days, we described this a “living in the Spirit” and “holiness.” Pietist traditions refer to it as “practicing the presence of God.” I suspect marxist and sentimentalist/romantic traditions use “unalienated labor” to describe the same experience, what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described as “flow.”
My hunch is that the search for unalienated labor in academia is no less a spiritual striving than the traditional religious varieties. It’s certainly selfcraft. If it has identifiable practices, considered self-narration, and source texts, it might even be a virtue tradition in its own right.
But what if it can’t be done? What if unalienated labor is only a fleeting peak experience, not easily replicable? What if it is possible, but only for a few exemplars/saints/boddhisatvas? Wouldn’t the humanities then be selling a lie?
The spiritual practices of pietism revolve around introspective self-flaggelation. Pietism sets up (near) impossible moral goals for its practioners and then blames them for falling short of the mark, a failure they are expected to internalize. Have the humanities adopted some pietist strain for its struggling graduate students? After all, it’s not the department’s fault it you (and many/most of your peers) don’t get a tenure track position, now is it?
The promise of unalienated labor is particularly appealing to twenty- and thirty-somethings. (Isn’t about time for another book on “quarterlife crisis” or the “age thirty transition?”) Almost every catch-up session with an old friend involves talk of what we want to be when we grow up, now that we’ve come face to face with alienated labor. The idyllic life of the idealized academic harkens back to simpler times–when a PhD could be at one with their work and at peace with the world–times which may have never existed in the first place, but times that academia hold out implicitly as the just reward for PhD work.
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