Monthly Archives: October 2009

Embracing the wildness of faith

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Bill over at The Thinklings put up a post yesterday quoting Chesterton at length (something almost always well worth doing) on the value of fairy tales for children, and concluding with some additional thoughts of his own:

This really resonates with me, because from a young age I rode like a squire through the Arthurian legends, crouched quietly in the belly of the horse with Odysseus, galloped alongside Centaurs in Lewis’ Narnia, and went into the dreadful dark of Moria with Frodo and Sam. These led me one day to open up a Bible and begin reading what Lewis would call the “true myth” of the ultimate, and fully historical, defeat of the dragon.

As parents we should, of course, protect our kids. But I think Chesterton makes a compelling case here for not limiting them with politically correct, neutered fiction that contains no dragons. How will they ever know that the dragon can be killed?

I think Bill’s absolutely right about that. As Chesterton says in the essay he quotes,

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

This is much the same point Russell Moore makes in the post I quoted Monday, and so it’s no surprise that Bill follows up today by quoting Moore as well. He also adds an extended quote from Danielle at Count the Days on the absurdity that passes for “Christian education” in so many places. It’s a great post:

The other day, in my Religious Education class, this question was posed to us:

“What do you want to teach a child by the time they are 12?”

During class we were supposed to get in groups and discuss what we thought kids need to know by that stage in their lives, and honestly, I was kind of appalled by the answers I heard. . . .

One girl had the audacity to call me “harsh” because I said that they need to know that they are sinners. How can anyone have an appreciation or understanding of salvation without first knowing what sin is and that they are a sinner? I understand that the average child cannot comprehend the intricacies of theology, but what Jesus-loving Children’s Minister can look at the kids in their ministry and knowingly keep the whole Truth from them? Bible stories are great and important in building a foundation for these kids, but knowing who Zaccheus was, or being able to sing the books of the Bible in order isn’t going to get anyone any closer to Heaven. Just sayin’.

I guess the reason it frustrated me so much was because I was thinking of my own (future/potential) children. I don’t want my ten/eleven/twelve year old thinking that “being a good person” or being “obedient” means anything without having a personal, intimate relationship with Christ. I mean sure, I want obedient children ;), but in the grand scheme of things that would not be on the top of my list.

And then perhaps the most important point she makes is this:

Children can be taught all kinds of things as long as they are taught in love and kindness. Give kids the opportunity to understand, instead of withholding Truth from them. Offer them the whole Gospel, not just cartoons or cut-and-dry facts. I know I probably sound like some hardcore beat-truth-into-them type of lady, but I hate the thought of kids wasting what can be the most influential years of growth on pointless trivia or partial Truth.

Amen. This is something of a soapbox of my own, and has been for a while—I don’t post on it a great deal, just on occasion, but it’s something I care quite a bit about in my congregation, and with my own kids—that so much of what we call “Christian education” in the church is just awful, trivial, milk-and-water stuff aimed at teaching kids to be nice, dutiful little serfs rather than at raising them up as followers of Jesus Christ.

The problem is, I think, that too many adults—and not just adults in the church, either—have lost touch with the wildness of the world, and the wildness of their own hearts. Part of it, as N. D. Wilson says, is that our rationalistic and rationalized, scientific and scientistic, we-are-civilized-and-we-can-control-everything culture tends to teach us to see all things wild and perilous as evil; we have tamed immense swaths of our world, made it comfortable and predictable, orderly and obedient, and so we see these as good things, and anything that threatens them as bad.

This logically leads us to lose sight of the wildness of evil, both within us and outside us. Hannah Arendt had an important insight when she wrote of “the banality of evil” (an insight which I believe is much less understood than quoted), but it’s equally important for us to understand that while evil is indeed dreary and banal, uncreative and far less attractive than it likes to pretend, it is not thereby tame and predictable and contained. We get reminders of this when things like 9/11 happen, but if we can convince ourselves that such things are outside our own experience—that their lesson doesn’t apply to us—then we do so as quickly as possible, convincing ourselves that our own lives are still safe and tame and under our control.

The consequence of this domesticated worldview for the church is that too often, we’ve tamed our faith. We have trimmed it to fit what this world calls reality instead of letting our faith expand our souls to fit God’s view of reality, and we have ended up with a domesticated faith in a domesticated God. After all, if we don’t see our world as a big, wild, uncontrollable world that threatens us and makes us uncomfortable, we don’t need a big, wild, uncontrollable God who makes us uncomfortable and calls us to fear him as well as love him; a god sized to fit the tame little problems we’ll admit to having will do nicely.

There are various antidotes to that, but one of them is, to bring this back around to Bill’s post, to Chesterton, and also to Tolkien, a keen acquaintance with the world of faerie. We need stories that do not only show us the wildness of evil somewhere else (for many of our movies and books do that much), but that show us the wildness of evil in our own hearts, and also the wildness of good. We need stories that powerfully communicate, not only rationally but also viscerally, the truth that (to borrow a line from Michael Card) there is a wonder and wildness to life, that true goodness is a high and perilous thing, and that the life of goodness is an adventure. We need to learn to hear the call to faith as the call expressed so well by Andrew Peterson in his song “Little Boy Heart Alive”:

Feel the beat of a distant thunder—
It’s the sound of an ancient song.
This is the Kingdom calling;
Come now and tread the dawn.

Come to the Father;
Come to the deeper well.
Drink of the water
And come to live a tale to tell . . .

Take a ride on the mighty Lion;
Take a hold of the golden mane.
This is the love of Jesus—
So good but He is not tame.

Photo © 2008 by Wikimedia user Corinata.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. 

Grace for the poison tongue

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We do amazing evil with our words. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” our folk wisdom tells us, and to hear the way people tell it, you’d think they’re mostly opposed, that the pen mostly seeks to resist the sword; but in truth, the pen is at its mightiest when it’s egging the sword on. It’s easier to exhort people to evil than to good; it’s easier to tear them down than to build them up; it’s easier to wound than to heal; it’s easier just to let our tongues flap in the breeze of our thoughts than it is to control them (thoughts or tongues, take your pick). Indeed, James 3 argues at some length that no one has ever yet succeeded in controlling the tongue, and I think the apostle is right; we can control it to some degree, but it always escapes us in the end.

Which means we need grace; we need to be forgiven for the evil that we do. It’s beyond our power to be good enough on our own. It also means that we need to show grace to others, even (and perhaps especially) when they show us none. Just as we struggle to control our tongues, and sometimes fail, so too others are going to fail sometimes, for we all stumble in many ways; that’s just life in a tomato can, as my old organist would say. We have been given grace, because we desperately need it; in return, we must show grace to others, because they also desperately need it, whether they acknowledge that need or not.

If someone says something they shouldn’t, it may be my responsibility to correct them, but if so I’m called to do so with love and grace; if I do so harshly and gracelessly, am I not as much at fault as they? Or if I upset or offend someone else, and they speak harshly to me, what is my responsibility to them? Because they spoke without grace, is it okay if I respond in kind—or do I need to show them grace anyway? Clearly, I need to control my tongue whether they’ve controlled theirs or not.

It’s not my place to decide whether they deserve grace—none of us deserves grace. Grace doesn’t come from what we deserve, it comes from the love of God; and it’s only as far as the love of God fills us and motivates us that we’ll be able to control our tongues and show his grace to others. Which means that the bottom line here isn’t “try harder,” it’s “submit yourself to God, draw close to him, and let him do in you what you can’t do in yourself.” The only way to live in grace is to live by grace.

(Partly adapted from “A Greater Judgment”)

Life with cat

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One of my Facebook friends posted this first video the other day; it cracked me up, so I went looking for more. Turns out the guy who made it, Simon Tofield, has his own YouTube channel which I had somehow, inexplicably, missed over the last year or so. I’m glad I found it, because this is truly a man who understands the humor of living with a cat.

The imperial history of SW Asia

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courtesy of Maps of War.  If you wanted to be persnickety, you could certainly critique their presentation, but it succeeds in its purpose—it gives you a feel for just how many empires have rolled through what is usually (wrongly) called the Middle East (the map’s focus is more on the Near East, and includes the whole of the broader region of Southwest Asia), and how it’s often served as a crossroads for imperial expansion.

Startling news from Rome

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The Anchoress has the roundup: the Vatican has decided to respond to the influx of orthodox folk from the Anglican Communion by creating what amounts (as best as I can tell) to a new type of diocese, within which they’ll be able to keep the Anglican liturgy and married priests, under their own bishops. Indeed, it sounds like married Anglicans who convert to Catholicism within one of these “personal ordinariates” will be able to become priests, though it also appears that married priests will not be eligible to become bishops

.Major, major concessions by Rome in the interests of church unity, giving serious weight to the concerns and convictions of conservative Anglicans. The effects of this will bear watching.

Sticks, stones, and poisoned arrows

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How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.

—James 3:5b-10 (ESV)

When you were young, and someone insulted you or made fun of you, did your parents tell you to say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? You know, most pieces of folk wisdom, I can see where they came from, but I have no idea why that one showed up; whoever came up with that one must have been someone who never heard a negative word in their life—or who was too thick-skinned and thick-skulled to notice. Honestly, that’s the dumbest famous saying that ever got famous; to borrow a line from Mark Twain, it’s “the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved.” Granted the harm that sticks and stones can do, it’s generally a lot easier to heal the body than it is to heal the spirit, if only because we can see what we’re working with; and often, it’s a lot easier to wound the spirit than it is to wound the body. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but only words can break me.

This is why James describes the tongue so starkly—it’s a restless evil, a poisoned arrow, a small fire that can set the whole forest ablaze; but though we might find his picture bleak, it’s hard to argue with. Yes, we also say many good things, and yes, we do much good with our words; but as he says, with our tongues we bless God, and with the same tongues we curse those he made in his likeness, and that should not be. For all the good we may do, we can undo many good words with one ill one. Winston Churchill famously said that a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has finished putting on its pants; or to go back to Twain again, “the history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal.” We might also say that for many people, self-confidence is a fragile flower, but self-doubt is a weed; sow a few seeds of the latter in the garden of their soul, and they may take years to recover. It is far easier for us to speak evil powerfully than it is to speak good powerfully, just as it’s easier to roll a boulder down a mountainside than up it; this is why Shakespeare could write in Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

(Excerpted, edited, from “A Greater Judgment”)

Christianity and the wild

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My previous post, reflecting on some of the things I’ve read about Spike Jonze’ movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, was largely sparked by Russell Moore’s post on the movie. Part of that was the paragraph I cited in that post, reflecting on what is good about the original book. Part of it too, though, was Dr. Moore’s comment about Christians who object to the movie on the grounds that it’s too scary—something which he seems to think (and I agree) is rooted in the tendency of so much of the church to sanitize our faith, and with it our worldview, to make it nice and safe.

I’m amazed though by the way some Christians react to things like this. They furrow their brow because the Max character screams at this mother, and bites her, even though this is hardly glorified in the movie. They wag their heads at how “dark” the idea of this wild world is. Of course it is “dark.” The universe is dark; that’s why we need the Light of Galilee.

Where the Wild Things Are isn’t going to be a classic movie the way it is a classic book. But the Christian discomfort with wildness will be with us for a while. And it’s the reason too many of our children find Maurice Sendak more realistic than Sunday school.

Too many of our Bible study curricula for children declaw the Bible, excising all the snakes and dragons and wildness. We reduce the Bible to a set of ethical guidelines and a text on how gentle and kind Jesus is. The problem is, our kids know there are monsters out there. God put that awareness in them. They’re looking for a sheep-herding dragon-slayer, the One who can put all the wild things under His feet.

Hallelujah! Amen.

Where are the wild things?

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The first I heard that Spike Jonze was making a movie of Where the Wild Things Are was when David Kavanaugh (whose work I’ve posted on a bit here) raved to me about how great the trailer was, calling it the best thing he’d seen on film all year. It was a pretty good piece of work, though I didn’t think it quite merited the praise he gave it, but it didn’t do what a trailer is supposed to do: make me want to see the movie. Rather the opposite, actually, as it gave me significant misgivings about what Jonze, Dave Eggers et al. were doing with the book; it really didn’t look like a movie I wanted to see.

From the reviews and early reactions, it appears to me that—to steal a line from my brother-in-law (on the Lord of the Rings movies)—the movie is almost but not quite completely unlike Sendak, even if Maurice Sendak himself disagrees. Indeed, it sounds like the movie falls short in ways I didn’t even see coming; I would hardly have thought to find a reviewer writing,

Where the Wild Things Are ultimately is not wild enough. Despite their extraordinary costumes, these ordinary characters fail to transform Max’s journey into something approaching magic.

To be sure, as io9’s reviewer notes, “Spike Jonze is known for making uncomfortable films”; that was part of the reason for my misgivings (on an abstract level, I admire Being John Malkovich and Adaptation as conceptual exercises, but I can’t say I enjoyed either of them or have any desire whatsoever to rewatch them), but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some might think that a movie based on a children’s book ought to be a comfortable film, but I’m not among them, especially when it comes to this particular book. That same reviewer writes,

Wild Things is not a movie about a little boy who wants to be wild, traveling (in his fantasy, or via magic) to a strange land full of monsters who make him their king and let him be as wild as he wants, until he gets homesick. Rather, Wild Things is a movie about the terrors and insecurities of childhood, and the monsters we all have inside of us. It presents an unnerving portrait of childhood as a stormy, exhilarating time, in which play is intensely serious and important, and loneliness is the biggest nightmare of them all.

Insofar as that’s true, that’s a good thing, because that’s very much in line with what the book is about. The problem seems to be, though, that Jonze made a movie that’s adult in all the wrong ways; the io9 review perhaps has the best statement of the common complaint:

At times during the main body of the story, I felt like I was sitting on a particularly long therapy session in a group home, or a Seinfeld episode with fewer jokes.

What seems to be missing is an actual childlike perspective. I was struck by Russell Moore’s post on the movie, and particularly his analysis of why so many children love the book:

Children, it turns out, aren’t as naive about evil as we assume they are. Children of every culture, and in every place, seem to have a built-in craving for monsters and dragons and “wild things.” The Maurice Sendak book appeals to kids because it tells them something about what they intuitively know is true. The world around them is scary. There’s a wildness out there. The Sendak book shows the terror of a little boy who is frightened by his own lack of self-control, and who conquers it through self-control, by becoming king of all the wild things.

The problem, I think, is that too many adults “grow out” of that awareness of the wildness of the world—perhaps it fades as the common illusion of control, over our own lives and over the world around us, grows. Only adults can wax philosophical about how evil is an illusion and people are really basically good; children aren’t yet capable of that sort of folly. Perhaps that’s why Jonze seems to have take a children’s book and turned it into a movie about adult issues and problems.

Obama media strategy: control the message

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This is an absolutely fascinating presentation by Anita Dunn, the White House Communications Director, on the media strategy of the Obama campaign—and by extension, the Obama administration. Her analysis is, I think, critically important for anyone who wants to understand the relationship between politics and the media in the current environment, and the approaches that politicians who want to be successful will need to adopt going forward.

From what I’ve seen, most of the blogospheric reaction has followed the tone of this WorldNet Daily piece:

President Obama’s presidential campaign focused on “making” the news media cover certain issues while rarely communicating anything to the press unless it was “controlled,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn disclosed to the Dominican government at a videotaped conference.”Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” said Dunn.

Though that presentation is not inaccurate, it’s designed to support the title of the piece:

White House boasts: We ‘control’ news media

and that title is inaccurate, in two ways. In the first place, Dunn nowhere claims to control the media; what she’s actually talking about is manipulating the media to control the message, to set things up in such a way that the story they have to report is the story you want them to report, so that your message gets out the way that you want it to get out. It’s not about controlling the media but using them for your purposes. (This was, of course, made a lot easier for them by the generally lap-doggish attitude of the major media toward Barack Obama.) And in the second place—and this is more important than it sounds—Dunn wasn’t boasting. She was simply reporting: “This is what we did, this is why we did it, and this is why it produced the result we wanted.”

What Dunn is essentially talking about here is the ways in which the development of the Internet has weakened and is eliminating the long-held power of the legacy media to filter reality, to decide what the culture in general will be broadly aware of—and the ways in which, in consequence, politicians can use that development to control their message. Indeed, she’s laying out a blueprint for doing so, and explaining why it was essential to her campaign’s success.

The fact that the Obama campaign understood this intuitively, and thus was able to use that intuitive understanding to do just that to an unprecedented degree, while the McCain campaign was completely clueless is one of the reasons Barack Obama is now sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The fact that Sarah Palin understands this, and in consequence has turned her Facebook page into a potent political weapon, is one of the reasons she is in my judgment the most important and effective political force in the Republican Party at this moment despite the best efforts of the legacy media to filter her right into impotence and irrelevance. Anyone who wants to compete with them in the future on anything approaching a level playing field is going to need to be smart enough and tuned-in enough to do likewise.

That is the real meaning and significance of Dunn’s presentation; rather than mistaking it for hubris on the part of the Obama administration and using it as one more cudgel with which to beat on the President, the Right needs to recognize her analysis of the political-media landscape as correct and her prescription as essential, and learn to go and do likewise. And the media had best do the same, and figure out how to adapt and respond, lest their current posture of lap-doggish servitude be institutionalized and rendered permanent.

HT: Janet McGregor Dunn

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

Short-term stimulus

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There have been a lot of claims made about jobs “saved or created” by the so-called “stimulus” (and how you measure a job “saved” when you don’t know the might-have-beens, I have no idea); but has it occurred to you to wonder how long those jobs have lasted? Apparently, not very long in some cases:

How much are politicians straining to convince people that the government is stimulating the economy? In Oregon, where lawmakers are spending $176 million to supplement the federal stimulus, Democrats are taking credit for a remarkable feat: creating 3,236 new jobs in the program’s first three months.

But those jobs lasted on average only 35 hours, or about one work week. After that, those workers were effectively back unemployed, according to an Associated Press analysis of state spending and hiring data. By the state’s accounting, a job is a job, whether it lasts three hours, three days, three months, or a lifetime. . . .

At the federal level, President Barack Obama has said the federal stimulus has created 150,000 jobs, a number based on a misused formula and which is so murky it can’t be verified.

When even the AP is noticing that Democratic politicians are playing games with the numbers, you know it’s hard to ignore. (Though it’s worth noting that the AP appears to be trying to hide the story, judging by the fact that this link is down.) It should of course be pointed out that Oregon’s behavior here is uniquely egregious:

Oregon’s accounting practices would not be allowed as part of the $787 billion federal stimulus. While the White House has made the unverifiable promise that 3.5 million jobs will be saved or created by the end of next year, when accountants actually begin taking head counts this fall, there are rules intended to guard against exactly what Oregon is doing.

The White House requires states to report numbers in terms of full-time, yearlong jobs. That means a part-time mechanic counts as half a job. A full-time construction worker who has a three-month paving contract counts as one-fourth of a job.

That said, the response from the state to that criticism is telling:

Oregon’s House speaker, Dave Hunt, called that measurement unfair, though nearly every other state that has passed a stimulus package already uses or plans to use it.

“This stimulus plan was intentionally designed for short-term projects to pump needed jobs and income into families, businesses and communities struggling to get by,” Hunt said in a statement. “No one ever said these would be full-time jobs for months at a time.”

But wasn’t that the implication? After all, when the President talked about “3.5 million jobs saved or created,” he didn’t add the caveat “but only for a little while”; an extra week’s worth of work is not nothing, to be sure—I’ve been a temp, I know the drill—but if that’s the best the government can do, your job hasn’t been saved, your job loss has just been delayed a bit. And when most people talk about “job creation,” temp work is most certainly not what they have in mind.

The truth is, this story from Oregon highlights how fuzzy and dubious these job claims are even when the politicians aren’t playing games with them. As the Reason Foundation’s Anthony Randazzo points out,

The problem remains that there is still no good way of counting exactly the number of jobs that wouldn’t have been lost because of the savings, and there is no way the government is going to track the number of jobs that have been lost because of stimulus spending (such as lost jobs in traditional energy because of green spending).

Put another way, all such claims depend on a knowledge of the might-have-beens—if we hadn’t done this, what other things might we have done instead, and what results would they have produced? And what would have happened if we hadn’t done anything at all?—and that’s knowledge we don’t actually have in any reliable way in most cases, and particularly when you’re talking something as complex and interconnected as the national economy.

HT: David Riddle