Now then, where were we?  Ah yes, Chapter 8 and the Lestrygonians. This is where Odysseus has been given his marching orders by Aeolus, and lands up on the island of the Lestrygonians.  A sexy wench lures the lads to more peril.  Daddy is Antiphates, king of the Lestrygonians, and he’s a giant cannibal.  He eats the shore party, but Odysseus gets away with the rest of the crew. 

So there’s lots of eating in Chapter 8.  It’s one o’clock and Bloom is getting hungry but in the end all he gets is a sandwich.  The chapter begins with an evocative image of a sugarsticky girl shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother (p150) – an image probably lost on anyone born after 1950 whose sweets come in gluttonous packets of hygienic plastic.  How we loved to take our sixpences to the sweet shop!  Those shopkeepers must have had the endless patience gene as we pondered the vast array, eventually choosing ‘one of these, and two of those, and a piece of licorice for mummy’.  We would have watched in awe had anyone bought shovelfuls of anything, for although we were not poor, such bounty was reserved for birthday parties.  Some school treat, says Mr Joyce, but I don’t remember anyone ever being given a sweet at school…

But I digress.  It’s amazing how evocative images of food are, how they tap into memories of home and family meals and childhood treats!  For Joyce, though, this chapter also offers the opportunity to allude to Ireland’s poverty: there’s a little girl in a tattered dress, underfed on a diet of ‘potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes’ (p151). Today people eat ersatz butter in the form of golden margarine because it’s thought to be better for the heart, but the pale margarine of poverty was apparently a different thing entirely.  Bloom is in no doubt about the role Catholic dogma plays in this poverty: he sees Dedalus’s daughter selling off the furniture because the home is being broken up, and we learn that Stephen’s mother had 15 children, birth every year almost, while the priests have no families themselves to feed (p151). A century after Joyce wrote this they’re still preaching increase and multiply, only now their victims are in the developing world, in Africa, South America and the Philippines and the consequences are not just a disaster for the family but also for global overpopulation.  I live in hope that their somnolent ‘loving’ god will send a revelation to the Pope to put a stop to the human misery this dogma causes. 

A Google search for Butler’s monument house corner (p151) led instead to James Joyce Ulysses: A Photo Journey, (an interesting site to compare Dublin today with Joyce’s Dublin at Joyce Images) and this in turn led to James Joyce Music, a site which explores all the musical references in Ulysses.  There’s a CD you could buy to play while reading, which would be nice, especially since the recording is done with just voice and piano so evocative of the times.   This link is to a music clip of Blumenlied, the Flower Song:

This is a song Bloom buys for his daughter Milly when she is taking piano lessons. Known in English as “The Flower Song,” it is tied to Bloom’s pen name, Henry Flower, which he uses in his clandestine correspondence with Martha Clifford. It is one of a number of flower references throughout Ulysses. (Cover notes)

A reader could spend years discovering the riches in this book!

The narrative technique in Lestrygonians is the interior monologue again, but in this chapter we see Bloom not wanting to think about what’s going on between Molly and Boylan.  Is this the first example in literature where the reader witnesses the truncated thoughts of a man repressing his fears and the text suppressing them too? As Bloom ponders various advertising strategies (p153) he remembers ads for Dr Hy Franks’ quack remedies for the clap, and suddenly it occurs to him that Boylan might infect Molly:

If he…

O!

Eh?

No…No.

No, no, I don’t believe it.  He wouldn’t surely?

No, no.

Mr Bloom moved forward raising his troubled eyes.  Think no more about that. (p153)

But his rebellious thoughts keep resurfacing.  As he passes by a cycle shop he remembers Molly’s sexy dress on a day at the races, the ’snug little room’ they had, and the ‘cosy smell of her bathwater’ on tub night.  They were happy.  Happier then. (p155).

Source: Joyce Images

This chapter brings me another statue to look out for when I visit Dublin next year.  Bloom passes by Tommy Moore’s roguish finger, a reference to Thomas Moore, (1779-1852) the bard of Ireland who ended up in Paris to escape gambling debts.  Bloom’s caustic allusion to the adjacent urinal references Moore’s popular ballad The Meeting of the Waters - a beauty spot in Ireland where the Avonmore and Avonbeg Rivers meet to form the Avoca River.

I don’t see how it meshes with the Lestrygonians theme or the digestive tract allusions, but most of the people Bloom meets in this chapter establish him as a sensitive and caring bloke.  Not exactly a SNAG, but fond enough of animals to spend a penny on Banbury cakes to feed some hungry pigeons (p152); kindly to melancholy Mrs Breen whose husband is ‘off his chump’ i.e. loopy(p159); genuinely concerned about Mrs Purefoy’s three-day labour ending in a stillbirth no one bothers even to register (p161) and sensitive to the pride of the ‘blind stripling’ he helps across the street (p180-1). 

It’s also an elegiac chapter, showing how profound Bloom’s losses have been.  Molly’s alienation dates from little Rudy’s death, and she – not wanting to risk having another child only to lose it –  ‘could never like it again’ (p167).    The ’stream of life’ (p155) seems utterly pointless to him:

His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun, slowly shadowing Trinity’s surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging.  Useless words.  things go on same; day after day; squads of police marching out, back; trams in, out.  Those two loonies mooching about.  Digman carted off.  Mrs Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her.  One born every second somewhere.  Other dying every second.  Since I fed the birds five minutes.  Three hundred kicked the bucket.  Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa. (p164) 

So he’s in a liverish mood (sorry, an irresistable pun) when he finally decides to turn into the Burton for lunch and the scene revolts him.

See the animals feed.

Men, men, men.

Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for bread no charge, swilling, wolfing, gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. (p168-9)

Hungry as he is, he can’t bear it (and it’s no pleasure to read either).  At Davy Byrne’s ‘nice quiet bar’ instead (p173) he has a chaste Gorgonzola sandwich ‘cut into slender strips’ (p172)  and a glass of burgundy – the choice of wine rather than Guinness emphasising his other-ness.  Alas, Nosey Flynn wants to chat about Molly’s upcoming tour, and mention of Blazes Boylan raises Bloom’s bile.  It was here that I realised that Bloom can’t go home till six o’clock because he doesn’t want to confront Molly and Boylan together.  It’s resignation rather than cowardice, I think.  Over his wine he indulges nostalgic memories of making love on Ben Howth, but such rapture is no longer possible.  ‘Me.  And me now’ he thinks, downcast (p176).

Poor old Bloom.  While he’s in the loo, the drinkers discuss him.  He’s a Mason, says Nosey, but ‘he’s not too bad’ and ‘has been known to put his hand down to help a fellow’ but that ‘God Almighty couldn’t get him drunk‘ and he won’t ever commit himself to anything in writing.  (He wouldn’t give Nosey a tip for the races either.) (p177-8)  But worse for Bloom than that is that when he leaves the bar and turns into Kildare St – after all his efforts to steadfastly avoid thinking about Boylan - he sees the man himself on his way to the assignation with Molly at two o’clock. 

Yet he’s still entertaining ideas about Martha Clifford, hoping that his ad in the Irish Times for a ‘smart lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work’ may lead to other offers! (p159)

BTW I searched Cliff Notes to see why the enigmatic UP message bothered Mr Breen so much but it transpires that nobody really knows.  I also used Notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses  written by Gerry Carlin & Mair Evans to refresh my memory of The Odyssey.

Page references are to my battered old copy of the Penguin Ulysses, 1979 ISBN 014003000x (which uses the 1960 Bodley Head edition, which was the 10th edition and has different page numbers to its predecessors.)

I was looking through my books about Noguchi, searching for references to his Bamboo Basket Chair (I knew I’d seen a black and white photograph of it somewhere years ago). Here’s what I learned about this beautiful piece of modernism:

The [August 1950] Mitsukoshi show also included a chair with a woven-bamboo seat backrest. Noguchi designed this piece for export, with the bamboo elements — produced in the same way as traditional fish baskets — to be fabricated in Japan and shipped to the United States. There they would be attached to bent-metal frames, manufactured in America. The chair remained a unique prototype, but the next year Noguchi was able to realize his ambition of encouraging local production through the export of modern design.

– Bruce Altshuler. Noguchi. Abbeville Modern Masters. New York: Abbeville , 1994, p. 58

When I finally found the reference (I love that chair!), what was especially interesting was the text immediately above and below this particular picture. It tells how Noguchi began the process of realizing his “ambiton” via the design of his Akari for production in Gifu, near Lake Biwa in Kansai.

It was on his way to Hiroshima to discuss his bridge proposal that Noguchi first visited the town of Gifu, known for its manufacture of umbrellas and lanterns from mulberry-bark paper. Having heard of his design work, the mayor asked him to create contemporary  lamps using the traditional bamboo-and-paper construction. That evening Noguchi sketched his first two Akari (the word means “light as illumination) light sculptures … He viewed each Akari basically as two sculptures, one when light was reflected off it, and another when light was emitted from it.

– Bruce Altshuler. Noguchi. Abbeville Modern Masters. New York: Abbeville , 1994, p. 58

From that evening, Noguchi went on to design and produce more than 100 Akari designs. They must have felt like children to him.

I’ve always said no home is complete without at least one Akari (IKEA knockoffs don’t count). I know they’re ridiculously expensive in North America (all those middle-people), but if you’re ever in Japan, stock up: they’re priced just right over there.

Isamu Noguchi. Memorial to the dead, Hiroshima, 1952. Model showing section through underground (projected to be built of black granite); proposed height above ground: 6 metres. Proposal rejected.

The four photographs above a from Isamu Noguchi. Text by Sam Hunter. New York: Abbeville Press, 1978:

While Noguchi was overseeing his two bridge railings in Hiroshima, the other giant of twentieth-century Japanese design, Kenzo Tange, was nearby working on his Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and other works in Hiroshima.

It was here, in the early 1950s, that modern Japan began.

Kenzo Tange, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Hiroshima, 1952.

Isamu Noguchi (second from left) and Kenzo Tange (third from left), visit the West Peace Bridge [Yuku] to supervise construction, 1951.

Courtesy of Chugoku Shimbun.

designKULTUR:
9 AKARI BY ISAMU NOGUCHI

Things seem to be going from bad to worse… According to a The Times (Online) report, Church of England is set to lose a tenth of its clergy in five years:

The Church of England is facing the loss of as many as one in ten paid clergy in the next five years and internal documents seen by The Times admit that the traditional model of a vicar in every parish is over.

The credit crunch and a pension funding crisis have left dioceses facing massive restructuring programmes. Church statistics show that between 2000 and 2013 stipendiary or paid clergy numbers will have fallen by nearly a quarter.

According to figures on the Church of England website, there will be an 8.3 per cent decrease in paid clergy in the next four years, from 8,400 this year to 7,700 in to 2013. This represents a 22.5 per cent decrease since 2000. If this trend continues in just over 50 years there will be no full-time paid clergy left in Britain’s 13,000 parishes serving 16,000 churches…

You can read the rest by clicking  here.

Pierre Bourdieu, in the opening section of his The Rules of Art that deals with Flaubert and Baudelaire, argues that the very category of the literary is born of the tormented working through of a true contradiction by certain artists . The contradiction arrives in the attempt to reach classless autonomy via a bourgeois, instrumentalized form – to create works that escape the mediocritizing determination of the market within the market itself.

We can extrapolate that the ineluctability of the contradiction is what leads to the privileging of failure as a literary motif during and after modernism. The very structure of the situation determines the fact that there is no winning this game. Le mot juste and all of the other juste things that were strived after in order to escape the banalizing forcefield of the market are of course nothing more than impossible, self-deconstructing chimera.

Let me put it another way. Pierre Bourdieu, in the opening section of his The Rules of Art that deals with Flaubert and Baudelaire, determines the very definition of the literary to be misery. Contradiction, double bind, antinomy were always already the devalued currency of this dysphoric realm.

I’ve been writing lately about browsing the newspapers of the early part of the last century. That era has always held a particular attraction for me because of the energy of the wide sweeping change that was taking place across all aspects of our world.  The transition from a horse-drawn world to the automobile.  The beginning of man in flight.  The beginning of true mass communication in the form of the recording and radio and film, a move away from live entertainment.  Everything was speeded up, changing faster and faster.  It was the birth of the Modern.

In art it was no different.  It was a transitional period away from the traditional, from the studied, academy-trained artist to the more expressive, individualized artist.  Modernism.

One of my favorites from that time is Marsden Hartley, a Maine-born painter.  I’ve always been attracted to a series of collage-like paintings he executed that are painted on a black ground, such as the one above, Portrait of a German Officer.  I love the way he puts his forms and colors together in these pieces, giving them a real visual impact.  His landscapes, such as Storm Clouds shown here, have that organic feel that I really like and look for in my own work.  By that, I mean that his shapes have a natural, human-like roll and feel.  I can’t really describe this well.

But it’s there.

There are stories behind many of his collage-like pieces. for instance, Portrait of a German Officer, was an homage to a German officer of WW I, the cousin of a close friend with which Hartley had been enamored ( he was gay) before being killed in the war. Knowing this gives the piece new meaning, added depth.

I know this is not a great lesson on Hartley or his work but there is more info out there, if you’re interested enough to look. He’s not the best known artist of his time but his influence continues…

So I’ve been thinking a fair bit about possibly the central thing we do as pastors – at least in terms of time spent on any single thing (research, preparation and delivery). We would take a half-day as a preaching team to work through a message, then I would take a day to write it and then about another half day spent marinating on it before delivery. So all up we’re looking at about fifteen hours of preparation and delivery for one message. Which I think is probably about average.

Recently I read Pagan Christianity by Viola and Barna, which was a really good read and instrumental in helping the church move beyond its institutionalization. They claim that preaching was never central to the church until a couple hundred years after Christ and really came into primacy with Luther who claimed it was the central part of the sunday service. He changed the term “priest” to “preacher”. Understandably preaching the word for Luther, who was putting reformed theology into the hands of hungry hordes of protesting catholics departing the catholic church in utter ignorance, was of utmost importance.

Viola claims that preaching in the NT was only done by apostles – church planters/workers in the process of establishing churches and on special occasions (Solomon’s temple etc.). They also claim that the office of Pastor is not an office, but a function and pastors didn’t preach.

I kinda disagree. I think pastors did preach because I believe Timothy was a pastor (Viola suggests he was “apostolic” because he obviously wasn’t an apostle, but his theory about pastors would fall over) and Timothy was urged by Paul to preach. Furthermore in Acts where it says the early disciples met from house to house and in the temple, would suggest it was a weekly occurrence.

Here’s where I get really creative now. Try and keep up.

Public teaching was done in the synagogue for centuries, so was embedded in Jewish culture. Furthermore, rhetoric was one of the most popular of entertainment of the day among the Greeks. Rhetoricians were public speakers who became famous and well paid for speaking eloquently (subject matter was inconsequential). So culturally in Judea, public speaking was the best form of communication and entertainment – infotainment would be a good word to describe it in today’s parlance. So it seems Jesus and his followers were using the best and most modern forms of communication that was most effective for their culture and the people of the day – preaching and teaching.

Translate that into today’s culture which is neither Greek nor Jewish. Preaching like we live in 100 A.D. in Judea simply isn’t cutting it. I even had trouble remembering what I preached the week before let alone thinking anyone else remembered (and I’m a good preacher). Which is why I resorted to The Big Idea which is simply one singular idea that I wanted people to leave the building with (there were other reasons to adopt it, primarily to use a preaching team and being able to keep a multi-site church moving in the same direction). I mean, how many sermons have you heard and actually implemented? It’s a completely modernist idea to think that simply giving people information will change their lives. We all know it doesn’t work like that, yet we continue doing it because it’s part of the consumer contract we have with our congregants (search this blog for consumerism).

Researchers on adult eduction have found that while teaching children “by rote” – in other words, I tell-you listen-you learn works, it doesn’t work with adults. And because preachers have all been to school and know nothing about educating adults, we use the only model we’ve known. Adult education doesn’t work like that. In fact when it comes down to it, experts concede that adult educators can only “facilitate” another adults learning. I won’t go into all the reasons for that. But bottom line, you can’t teach someone anything until they are ready to learn it. Kinda sounds like that old chinese saying “when the student is ready, the master will appear” – except we’re not masters… but you get the point.

The other thing that complicates the issue is that we live in the information age. No-one knows how vast the internet is. It’s not measurable. That’s how much information is out there. I can download the best preachers in the world hours after they deliver the sermon. And they’re way better communicators that you or I. I can download theology, christian books, magazines and blogs. I can even check the lexicons and commentaries while you’re preaching to see if your exegesis and hermeneutics are up to scratch. So that’s what we’re up against. So if we’re going to trade in information, I guarantee you, your congregation can get better information any day of the week.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us reaching for the best communication forms available to us for today’s culture and not simply dishing out information because adults don’t learn like that (and neither do you by the way so don’t be surprised that no-one else does either), but rather facilitating an experience. How’s that for radical? I’ll let you think about that for a bit, and I’ll unpack my conclusions later.

This is a poster I designed in October 2009. It is for an exhibition of staff work at LCC. Staff were asked to revisit the student experience by undertaking workshops in processes that were unfamiliar to them. This gave them a heightened empathy with how students learn.

Christians are hearing about the Manhattan Declaration with great excitement.  It is a tremendous document with tremendous support from some tremendous Christian figures.

The actual declaration (linked to above) is some 4,000 plus words long, and is available to read at the link above.  But here is the nutshell version:

Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life
2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

I hope you stand with me – and with (at last count as of November 24, 2009) 106,738 other believers – and sign this declaration.

It reminds me of another time, and another declaration: the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which was a point-by-point denunciation of the fascist and racist ideological doctrines of Nazism and a positive expression of true Christian faith against a government and a culture that had become evil.

Adolf Hitler attempted to redefine – or “Nazify” – the Church and transform it into a component of his ideological agenda.  At one point in its history Germany had been the seat of the Protestant Reformation, and while Germany had since become the most secular humanist nation in Europe, there was still a vestige of Christianity remaining.  And Hitler wanted to harness that still-influential vestige toward his own ends.  The government thus passed resolutions to limit the influence or dictate the agenda of the church.  One demanded the purging of all pastors who rejected “the spirit of National Socialism.”  Another resolution categorically rejected the very foundations of Judeo-Christian transcendent morality even as it tried to conflate “being a German” with “being a Christian”:

“We expect that our nation’s church as a German People’s Church should free itself from all things not German in its services and confession, especially from the Old Testament with its Jewish system of quid pro quo morality.”

The German Confessing Movement was a reaction against the German government’s attempt to impose its agenda upon the Christian Church in Germany.  As Gene Edward Veith put it in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview:

The Barmen Declaration thus sets itself against not only the German Christian aberration but against the whole tradition of modernist syncretism that made it possible.

[Article 1 affirmed Christ as the transcendent authority and source of values (as opposed to the German race, the Nazi revolution, or the person of Adolf Hitler)].  Article 2 asserts the sovereignty of Christ over all of life.  Article 3 asserts Christ’s lordship over the church and rejects “the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political conventions.”  That is to say, the world does not set the agenda for the church.  Article 4 teaches that church offices are for mutual service and ministry, not for the exercise of raw power.  Article 5 acknowledges the divine appointment of the state, but rejects the pretensions of the state to “become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s vocation as well.”  Article 6 affirms the church’s commission to proclaim the free grace of God to everyone by means of the Word and the sacraments.  “We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans [pp. 60-61].

One article, entitled “Hitler’s Theologians: The Genesis of Genocide,” takes time to describe how various key German liberal theologians systematically tore apart the Bible and orthodox Christianity – and in so doing systematically undermined the ethics and morality of the German people in preparation for the hell to come.  The author begins with Friedrich Schleiermacher, called “the founder of Liberal Protestantism,” and profiles the “contributions” of Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Wellhausen, and Adolf von Harnack.

Georg Lukacs has observed that tracing the path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Weber [page 5, The Destruction of Reason].  And Max Weinreich produced an exhaustive study detailing the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime entitled Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People.  Ideas have consequences, and it was the ideas of these liberal theologians, philosophers and scholars who provided the intellectual justification and conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Thus Nazism did not merely emerge from a liberal theological system, but from a distinguished secular humanist intellectual tradition as well — a distinguished intellectual tradition that had repudiated all the moral and spiritual values inherent to the orthodox Christianity of the Confessing Church.

Josef Hromadka wrote that:

“The liberal theology in Germany and in her orbit utterly failed.  It was willing to compromise on the essential points of divine law and of “the law of nature”; to dispose of the Old Testament and to accept the law of the Nordic race instead; and to replace the “Jewish” law of the Old Testament by the autonomous law of each race and nation, respectively.  It had made all the necessary preparation for the “Germanization of Christianity” and for a racial Church.”

Veith subsequently says, “in deciding whether or not to sign the Barmen Declaration … the dividing line was clear.”  And he states, “The German Christian theologians predictably denounced the confessional movement as being ‘narrow’ and ‘fundamentalist.’”  He rightly described the opponents of the Barmen Declaration as being “modernists,” “existentialists,” and “dialectical” in their thinking.  The theologians who rejected Barmen were men like Emanuel Hirsch, who taught that the resurrection of Christ was only a spiritual vision, and that the idea of a physical resurrection distorted Christianity by focusing attention to the hereafter rather than to the culture and community of the present.

In short, it was Christians who thought like the evangelicals and fundamentalists of today who signed the Barmen Declaration and openly opposed Nazism, and it was “Christians” who thought like the mainline liberals of today who stood for the German Christian Nazification of Christianity and for the resulting Nazification of German ethics and morality.

Confessing Church pastors and priests who resisted this Nazification of the church paid dearly.  Thousands of clergymen were hauled away to the concentration camps.  According to the Niemoller archives, 2,579 clergymen were sent to Dachau alone – and 1,034 of them died in the camp.  And that only refers to the priests and pastors – not the untold thousands of devout Christians such as the Ten Booms who perished in the death camps for their opposition to Nazism.

An article entitled “Asking ‘Why Nazism?’” reviewing a book by Dr. Karla Poewe has this:

“One of the dangers of liberal Christianity, where all sorts of interpretations are permitted, is that it can easily slip into becoming a new religion,” Poewe says. “This is what happened. In a bid to rid Germany of what it saw as Jewish Christianity, several home-grown practices sprang up, including some that incorporated Icelandic and pre-Christian sagas, as well as ideas from German Idealism.”

Although initially these new religions were separate and disorganized entities, they eventually came under the umbrella of what was known as the German Faith Movement. Hitler saw in it a mechanism for transmitting and reinforcing the National Socialist worldview. “He shaped its followers into a disciplined political force but dismissed its leaders later when they were no longer needed,” Poewe says.

We’re clearly not to the point where Jews, or Christians, or anyone else are being gathered by the thousands and placed in death camps.  But we’re beginning to see a trend that is frightening, as government, with the assistance of liberal “Christian” churches and organizations, are trying to impose their will upon the church and its agenda.

We’ve had a “hate crimes” law imposed upon us that makes homosexuality a protected behavior.  And one evangelical expresses the Confessing Church position in a nutshell:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said in a written statement the bill “is part of a radical social agenda that could ultimately silence Christians and use the force of government to marginalize anyone whose faith is at odds with homosexuality.”

In another recent case, a Christian mother who has homeschooled her child is being forced to put her ten-year old child in public school, not to improve her academic education, but to limit her exposure to Christianity and forcibly expose her to a government-approved “public” point of view:

According to the court order, the guardian concluded that Amanda’s “interests, and particularly her intellectual and emotional development, would be best served by exposure to a public school setting in which she would be challenged to solve problems presented by a group learning situation and…Amanda would be best served by exposure to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior.”

This is a shocking case, in which the government is usurping both parental and religious freedoms.  And there are many similar usurpations today, in which our government is actively opposing Christian values.

Nearly fifty million babies have been killed in this country by a government-sanctioned “pro-choice” system.  Gene Edward Veith addresses the “pro-choice” movement and its philosophical underpinnings:

Existential ethics brackets the objective issues on abortion entirely.  At issue is not some transcendent moral law, nor medical evidence, nor a logical analysis.  The content of that choice makes no difference.  If the mother chooses to have the baby, her action is moral.  If she chooses not to have the baby, her action is still moral.  If she bears a child against her will or aborts a child against her will — then and only then is the action evil.  Those who believe that abortion should be legal do not consider themselves “pro-abortion.”  They are “pro-choice.”  The term is not only a rhetorical euphemism but a precise definition of existential ethics.

Existentialism is also reflected in those who are “pro-choice” but personally oppose abortion.  They do not believe in abortion for themselves, but refuse to impose their beliefs on others.  In this view, a belief has no validity outside the private, personal realm of each individual.  Moral and religious beliefs are no more than personal constructions, important in giving meaning to an individual’s life, but not universally valid.  Or, to use another commonly accepted axiom, “what’s true for you may not be true for me.”

Such a view of truth flies in the face of all classical metaphysics, which sees truth as objective, universal, and applicable to all” (page 96, Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview).

We can return to the historical analysis of Nazism presented by Karla Poewe, and what happened when such “anything goes” belief systems were allowed to rule.  [I am writing an article describing how existentialism became a primary component of Nazism, and will link to it here when I am finished writing it].

Before we leave the issue of abortion as a vile violation of Christian ethics and morality, let us consider one more voice:

“But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child – a direct killing of the innocent child – murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” — Mother Teresa

Christians should fight for life.  And allowing a human being to live should not be a “choice,” but a duty.

In 2003 one David Allen Black wrote an article bearing the question, “Do We Need A New Barmen Declaration?“  No Christian with a knowledge of history can answer any other way than, “YES!“

The Barmen Declaration was written in 1934, but in many ways it was already too late: The Nazis were already in power.  Hitler was in his second year of power; and the ideas of the liberal theologians, the existentialist philosophers, and the amoral intellectuals were already firmly in place.

It is my fervent hope that we finally have that “New Barmen Declaration” to answer the evils of our own day.  If we already should have written one, then every day that passes is one more day wasted; if we are acting pro-actively, then let us thank God that we acting before it is too late.

From the UK Telegraph:

At last, Christians draw a line in the sand against their PC secularist persecutors

By Gerald Warner UK Last updated: November 24th, 2009

At long last, Christian leaders have faced up to their persecutors in the secularist, socialist, One-World, PC, UN-promoted axis of evil and said: No more. In the popular metaphor, they have drawn a line in the sand. For harassed, demoralised faithful in the pews it will come as the long-awaited call to resistance and an earnest that their leaders are no longer willing to lie down supinely to be run over by the anti-Christian juggernaut. This statement of principle and intent is called The Manhattan Declaration, published last Friday in Washington DC.

It is difficult to believe that so firm an assertion of Christian intransigence in the face of persecution will not have some beneficial effects even here. For this Declaration is no minor affirmation by a few committed activists: on the contrary, it is signed by the most important leaders of three mainstream Christian traditions – the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and Evangelical Protestants. For an ecumenical document it is heroically devoid of fudge, euphemism and compromise.

The Manhattan Declaration states that “the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions”.

For Barack Obama, the PC lobby, the “hate crime” fascists and, by implication, their opposite numbers in Britain, the signatories have an uncompromising message: “We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.” That is plain speaking, in the face of anti-Christian aggression by governments. The signatories spelled it out even more unequivocally: “We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but we will under no circumstances render to Caesar what is God’s.”

In a world where a Swedish pastor has been jailed for preaching that sodomy is sinful, similar prosecutions have taken place in Canada, the European Court of Human Rights (sic) has tried to ban crucifixes in Italian classrooms, Brazil has passed totalitarian legislation imposing heavy prison sentences for criticism of homosexual lifestyles, Amnesty International is championing abortion, David Cameron has voted for the enforced closure of Catholic adoption agencies, and Gordon Brown’s government has just been defeated in its fourth attempt to abolish the Waddington Clause guaranteeing free speech – this robust defiance is more than timely.

The signatories are unambiguously expressing their willingness to go to prison rather than deny any part of their religious beliefs. Those signatories are heavyweight. On the Catholic side they include Justin Cardinal Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia; Adam Cardinal Maida, Archbishop Emeritus of Detroit; the Archbishops of Denver, New York, Washington DC, Newark, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Louisville; and other Bishops. The Orthodox include the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America and the Archpriest of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. There are also the Anglican Primates of America and Nigeria, as well as a host of senior Evangelical Protestants.

In terms of influence on votes and public opinion, this is a formidable coalition. It has served notice on the US government that further anti-Christian legislation will provoke cultural trench warfare and even civil disobedience. As regards the sudden stiffening of resistance among the usually spineless Catholic leadership, it is impossible not to detect the influence of Benedict XVI.

We need more declarations like this, on a global scale, and the requisite confrontational follow-up. This is Clint Eastwood, make-my-day Christianity – and not before time. From now on, any governments that are planning further persecution of Christians had better make sure they have a large pride of lions available for mastication duties. The worm has turned.

As a young Christian, I was inspired by the music, lyrics, and album cover of Keith Green’s album, No Compromise.  The cover says it all:

The Manhattan Declaration – like the Barmen Declaration – calls for Christians who are willing to stand up and be singled out even in the face of persecution or punishment.

I hope you are willing to be one of those Christians.

The Church

1.  The Church by Edmund Clowney

Hands down the best book examining the theology of the church.

2.  No Place for Truth by David Wells

A classic analyzing blow-by-blow how evangelicalism got intertwined with modernity.  If you like this book, I would also suggest his books, God in the Wasteland and The Courage to Be Protestant.

3.  Christ and Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr

In this classic, Niebuhr examines five different relationships the church may have to culture/world.  I would also commend two books that examine this book:  D.A. Carson’s, Christ and Culture Revisited and Craig Carter’s, Rethinking Christ and Culture.

4.  Deliberate Church by Mark Dever

Dever gives a thorough look at the structure and justification for all aspects of Capitol Hill Baptist Church.

5.  Nine Marks of a Healthy Church by Mark Dever

This book has saved me from unhealthy churches for 10 years now (thanks John B.).

6.  Worship in Spirit and Truth by John Frame

Frame gives a thorough, balanced, and palatable defense of the regulative principle.

7.  The Safest Place on Earth by Larry Crabb

The church (and Christian community) is/are meant to be the safest place on earth.  Sadly, this is often not only not the case, but the church can be the least safe place on earth.  Crabb discourages a legalistic culture within the church and encourages gracious, authentic, and vulnerable community.

8.  Confessions of a Reformission Rev by Mark Driscoll

A hilarious look at the lesson Mark Driscoll learned while planting Mars Hill Church in Seattle.

9.  Prophetic Untimeliness:  A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance by Os Guinness

A needed critique for over-contextualizers who would sacrifice the Gospel in order to be cool.

10.  Missional Church by Darrell Guder (ed.)

This book is a good introduction to the ideas and practices of the missional church movement.  Its hard to believe this book is over 10 years old.

Kant’s Essay on Enlightenment

Kant might have been only responding to a newspaper query in answering the question, however, the views expressed therein might as well
encapsulize the aspirations and ideals of the intellectual movements that have been acting proactively and reactively to combat the stifling forces of the socio-political systems of the eighteenth century.

He described the means to attain an aspect of humanization of the individual, to achieve one’s full potential as a thinking being, wherein one takes active part in the pursuit of knowledge, and to have sole responsibility in teaching oneself of the truths encountered in that pursuit, so as to arrive at a perspective independent of the prevailing institutions of the time. In short, to be one’s own man.

His statements appear deceptively innocuous and very carefully worded s far as political and military authorities were concerned, but totally uncharitable to religious views and their adherents. It might as well be so, writing in Prussia, one of the most powerful military states of the time, and the Unifier of the then highly fragmented German states.

Other philosophers and scientists might have been exercising more or less restraint in attacking the superstitions and the obduracy of the authorities when it comes to being pilloried, however, the implications of serving the creed of individual/self-determination, on how far freedom and reaction to the realizations of critical thinking could be obtained with lasting results were not lost on those who were under the yoke of colonial domination or any form of intellectual or political repression.

It it debatable whether Kant was arguing for a more radical form of exercising that freedom, of totally overthrowing the Guardians upon proven guilty of being hindrances to that “freedom from immaturity”, but cursory study of the events that suddenly were precipitated after or during Enlightenment, we could theorize with conviction that the peoples in nation-states touched by these concepts of which Kant is one of the spokespersons, had acted on these views to the fullest, if not, to the extreme.

Let us be clear that Kant’s Essay explicitated the necessity of disregarding religious authorities insofar as their guidance was flawed, while rulers/superiors that demand obedience were, by inference, tolerate no dissent leading to open rebellion. Thus, Kant had indicted oppressive governments/rulers and intolerant religious hierarchies as the adversaries of human individual and social progress and/or expansion of knowledge.

Thus, without stating it, it would follow, a reader could reason, that a confrontation or open conflict with these “adversaries” would be inevitable, in the pursuit of one’s reasoning and search for Truth.

It goes without saying that the sudden explosion of scientific discovery, social criticism, critical and satirical literature, and the great political upheavals in the French, British, and American Revolutions, especially the American Revolutionary War, had had their seeds planted during the Enlightenment, and that was followed by the Modern Era. On a local note, Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo novels recounting the abuses of the Spanish overlords and friars in the Philippines further inflamed the Filipinos to revolt from the Spanish Crown.

The importance of Kant’s assertions do not lie in whether he was directly responsible for influencing revolutionaries, anymore we can credit Nietschze of the superstition of Aryan racial superiority or Marx with the Communist Revolution, rather Kant had been a famous element in “internationalizing” liberalism, as was his French, British, and American counterparts, thus helping corroborate the universality of the individual reasoning and its social expression and actualization. Here, philosophers, scientists, and thinkers buttressed each others’ conclusions and modes of thinking. We could perceive here an “underground international democratic movement” as far as the number of unforgiving military, political, and religious authorities were concerned.

The question now remains, “Is Kant’s call to ‘dare to know’, with its revolutionary undertones necessarily relevant in today’s society?” The answer to that would be taken up vigorously by Michel Foucault.

Michel Foucault: What is Enlightenment?

According to Foucault, the reasoning “component”, and thus, its published or publicly expressed intentions, of the Enlightenment, is but a part of the complex power relations and historical circumstances and factors that birthed the Modern Age, subsuming any philosopher, or their theories and convictions, into a greater whole, that Foucault seems to require laymen to comprehend from its totality to its minute machinery. So, any defintion of Enlightenment, in a few facts and explanations, would not suffice without contrasting it to other eras, and making anyone a scholar if one dares to match Foucault’s challenge.

As for his take on achieving enlightenment, one should be aware of one’s own capabilities, or even one’s attitude, and taking into account present reality, the lessons of history, before philosophizing and then undertaking the insinuated quixotic admonition of Kant, “aude sapere”, lest our collective or individual action following this misguided direction lead to the “return of the most dangerous traditions”.

This he adeptly illustrated by mentioning National Socialism and Stalism as humanisms, and that the Enlightenment nourished a plethora of humanisms enthusiatically making good “thinking without guidance from another”, thus pointing out the possibility of people/societies overstepping their “aude sapere”.

Thus, Foucault appears to advocate a more moderate approach to the concepts of enlightenment, one that is in accordance with modern sensibility and stability.

However, it seems ironic that Foucault, a Frenchman, faults the Enlightenment and propaganda/discursive formation, whereas his countrymen

aided the American cause in repudiating the Divine Right of Kings, an Enlightenment political contention, and radically enforcing “Give me liberty or give me death” against British Rule, the political “guardian” of the Colonies.

The victory of the American Revolutionaries could by no means be attributed to blind luck. American and French leaders were visionaries, as far of the reality aspects of the war and the confidence of securing victory, was concerned. They had Foucault’s view of Enlightenment in mind when they

utilized tactics, logistics, and knowledge of terrain to break British Hegemony of the Atlantic, and establishing the world’s largest democracy since the first democratic assembly was held in Athens, Greece.

Question to be asked of Foucault’s polemics on Kant’s assertions is: Is it absolutely necessary for Foucault to discredit Kant, whose views were absolutely IMMEDIATELY PERTINENT to the Enlightenment Era in general, and to the American Revolution and Nation-building in particular, or does his philosophizing beg the question? Furthermore, is he guilty of theorizing for theorization sake?

A follow up question would be: What realizations could a student attain in the analysis of the two essays?

For the former, Foucault should have had recognized Kant’s words value for its reflection on the dependency of the Guardians’ (rulers, governments, church, or any other authority) mandate on the sufferance of their constituents, on the majority’s perception of their maintenance of civil liberties and rights, and the truth about each person being responsible for their learning and decision-making. His perambulation on Enlightenment, his own application of discursive formation, historicity of power relations, is nonetheless brilliant, yet, is far from what a layman would have time for, unlike Kant’s easily comprehensible text, the facility of which easily urges one to action. One could surmise that Foucault strove to be only understood by a few, while Kant was trying to reach a great number of people with his simple-worded text. For the latter, a student should realize: (a) Responsible to learn as much as possible not only to be good at one’s profession but to also uphold dignity and to be in the best position to protect one’s own rights; (b) institutions are established to serve the interests of the constituents. Failure to do so would invite censure, and the people should readily speak out against such abuses of power and advocate reforms; (c) radical liberal views, though attractive and seductive in their passionateness, should be critiqued in the light of today’s due process of law, primacy of social order, the best forums for the redress of grievances, proper expression of dissent, etc., just to name a few possible student responses.

The best definition of enlightenment remains in the hands of the individual, by how far and how purposeful one’s own desire to conscientiously advance oneself in knowledge, skill, and self-actualization and humanization, and in doing so, one would best serve the family and society.

I actually had a different post in my queue, but this conversation got so interesting that I thought that I would throw my two cents in and bring it front and center before continuing with my own modest critique of science and introducing the phenomenology of Charles Sanders Peirce as planned.

Tom, I haven’t as yet read Feyerabend, but I certainly will now, and when I do I will print my thoughts here. I have been re-reading Thomas Kuhn on the nature of scientific revolution, a little Wilfred Sellers and his critique of science and some contemporary philosophers namely Joseph Margolis and Robert Brandom. These have all given me a great deal to think about in terms of placing science in context of the progression of human thought.

At Brian’s suggestion I have also read a couple of Michael Shermer’s books and he is, of course, a scientific apologist, ever defending logic and rationality against the dogma of religion and belief. I don’t think he is a joke, in fact he seems like a thoughtful critic of certain entrenched ideas (and he often presents himself as more open-minded than he is sometimes represented by Brain.) In some ways, however, he strikes me as fighting a battle that has already been won – at least among the people I tend to associate with in Integral/Evolutionary circles. Few people in that group are struggling with belief in unfounded dogmatic ways, they either have given up dogma for something new (which could always be a new dogma) or they have found reasons to feel comfortable holding on to more traditional religious beliefs as they move into the future. I think Michael Shermer is largely talking to a different audience.

In one recent book Shermer dismantles the “Intelligent Design” evolutionary position. I myself ascribe to a variation on this idea – that there is some form of teleology in the universe – but the way I think of teleology is far from the intelligent designer personified that is often being promoted by many in the Intelligent Design movement. Pulling apart Intelligent Design as a cardboard veneer stapled over Christian Creationism isn’t terribly hard, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. There is lots of sloppy thinking and bad science mixed in with the great stuff in the intelligent design debate and Shermer has many years of good work ahead clearing it up. Yet again, I don’t think that I or we are really his audience; we are already on his side in that battle.

The battle that I am currently following is the battle in the second half of the 20^th century that Tom is referring to in which the shortcomings of science have been placed under a microscope by some brilliant and insightful thinkers. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Science has no method, although Feyerabend may change my mind. I still see science as the triumph of the Western World that has given us so much we enjoy in modern life. I am not ready to tell all the scientists to pack it up and go home because they are not really following a method. I want them to keep going with their method and discover new cures to diseases, better methods of communication and travel, and generally continue to improve the standard of living for people on this planet.

On the other hand and in accordance with many of sciences critics, I don’t want them dictating what is real and what is unreal. When science brought logical positivism, rationality and empiricism to the for front of the Western Mind it rightfully claimed that it had a better handle on truth than did the traditional religion that was its main competitor. At the same time the traditional religions had a right to tell science not to move so fast and throw out the baby with the bathwater. After all it wasn’t science that pulled Western Europe through the Dark Ages. It was, for all it faults, Christianity that stopped warlords from killing each other and everyone else in the process by getting them to pledge allegiance to a common king in the person of Jesus and then sending them off to fight a common enemy in the crusades. As horrendous as the crusades were – and they were for sure – they also bought Western Europe enough peace to rebuild the population that had been decimated by the plagues and then move beyond the system of feudalism to the nation state.

Similarly as the limits of science are being explored we also want to keep the discussion in a historical context. Science is a perspective on reality that mistakes itself for the whole of reality – hmmmm, the same could be said about religion. The kind of objective handle on truth that science claims is not objective. Science often fails to see its assumptions about reality as assumptions and mistakes them for “givens” (Wilfred Sellers). Science also fails to see itself in the historical context in which it was developed (Kuhn) and therefore neglects the cultural forces that have helped shape its point of view.

So the modernism of science has been overrun in some quadrants – and not those in which Michael Shermer is currently fighting the good fight of modernism  – by post-modernism. Post-modernism sees right through the problems of science. It sees how scientists fail to recognize that their point of view is not merely a strictly objective assessment of observed facts. Science is a perspective that has been shaped by some complex of conclusions based on observed facts, personal preferences and biases of the scientists involved, and cultural influences that are often mistaken for reality. And so science has been on the run – again in certain quadrants – for decades trying to prove itself and finding its truth claims falling short of its promise in many ways.*

In turn post-modernism is and will find that its own foundation – that all knowledge is a matter of perspective and cultural influence – is also a perspective. Once again we will have mistaken the most recently discovered part of the picture for the whole of reality and we will get up, dust off and continue with our rush toward an ever more integrated understanding of knowledge, ourselves and our relationship to the world. 

*(An interesting example of science on the run is the defense of Behaviorism that Carl is often an eloquent champion of in this blog. I often find myself agreeing with everything Carl says about the powerful perspective of seeing human activity as pure behavior, and yet disagreeing with the spoken and unspoken implications that go along with it. I have read some things that Carl has generously given to me and I can’t (as yet) agree with the hard determinism and denial of internal being that seems to come along with that view. I have also read other contemporary thinkers on the matter and from what I have found the strict interpretations of Behaviorism are generally disregarded as already haven been proven wrong (although I haven’t found that proof in a satisfactory form yet.) Often I think what Carl and some of his circle like Robert Epstein are acctually doing are advancing Skinner’s original work to keep Behaviorism in step with more recent advancements in science, but this is a digression from my original point although an avenue of inquiry that I want to keep on the table.)

By Rusaila Bazlamit; originally published on Reflect Upon on July, 22, 2008

So finally I have read [The Fountainhead] a novel that I knew many people praising… Once I started reading it I couldn’t stop till I finished it…
The novel is written by Ayn Rand… in the novel Rand chose Architecture as a form of self-expression…

Gary Cooper as Howard Roark; Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

I can’t understand why during my 5 years studying architecture none of my professors recommended the book… It is such a good book and deals with architecture in a new critical way… allowing us to interpret the history of architecture and the modern practices of it in a new way…

Many of the main characters are involved in Architecture whether they are architects like the main character Howard Roark or they are critics of architecture like Ellsworth Toohey…

The Fountainhead; Ayn Rand

The Fountainhead; Ayn Rand

The novel talks about selfishness, egotism and altruism through another perspective which shakes some of the bases of how societies are led to approve or condemn actions that are defined as virtues or sins by other people for whatever agenda…
As you are reading there will be many sections which you forget you are reading a novel but you concentrate on the ideas presented… again gaining more insights about architecture and society.
I liked the way Rand has used architecture as a medium to convey her own philosophies…
The novel is definitely a must-read… especially for architects and architecture students…
The novel had been made into a movie in the 1940s but I’m always disappointed when a novel is turned into a movie… so I recommend the novel… having said that I found this video of Howard Roark’s speech toward the end of the movie… is worth seeing… [ full Howard Roark courtroom speech]

Howard Roark: A building has integrity, just like a man.

The Fountainhead; Ayn Rand

The novel also tackles some of the ideas related to Capitalism and though I’m myself an anti-capitalism to the core… I have to say that I had a new understanding of Capitalism that made me reflect more about some of own ideas related to man, freedom and wealth…
Also the concept of self, self-sacrifice, selfishness made me think about the concept of the self in my own Islamic beliefs which I’ll talk about some other time…

It is a mind opening when we understand the hidden driving forces that shape, create and re-create some of our basic cultural and societal patterns…

The Fountainhead one of my best novels of all times…

Ever since I was a child and used to attend a double feature with Randolph Scott and Alan Ladd at the Midway Theater on Queen Boulevard, in Forest Hills, I have loved going to the movies.  Films are bigger than life yet they reflect so much of what we are, strive to be and sometimes what others want us to become.  Their visual lessons dramatize the truths of life, appeal to our romantic sentiments and sometimes even inflame our passions.  Sometimes they even teach us something.

I recently saw a new film, An Education that was ostensibly about the loss of innocence of a sixteen year old girl. Now in most parts of this country, except where there is a Planned Parenthood Clinic, that would send off alarms about sexual abuse and the exploitation of our children.

The previews and the opening segments thoroughly romantized their budding relationship.   But half way through the movie, it became apparent as Jenny’s parents’ initial resistance to their mutual affection began to melt away under the intense animal heat of the charmingly slick suitor, David Goldman that Jenny was as good as “ruined.”

During the second half of their story the onion layers peeled away as Goldman is characterized for what he really was, a conniving flim-flam man who used black immigrants to break real estate blocks, stoled art work from elderly women and deflowered virgins—all in a day’s work.

Despite its veiled attempt at anti-Semitic depiction, this movie is not about that.   Its main focus is on the seduction of a culture by materialism, greed and self-advancement.  It was no accident that this movie was set in the 1960s because this is when the fruits of modernism first started to reel their ugly head.  An Education is rich in metaphorical content.  Jenny’s parents are the guardians of their daughter’s virtue because that where the future of any culture resides.  Morally strong and virtuous women make for a strong society.  (For a thoroughly insightful review of this film with all of its cultural implication, go to HenryMakow.com.)

It was Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinian Communist (Yes Virginia there really are things called “communists” and they truly want to destroy the way you life.) and later the Frankfurt School of Social Research that started the long march through our culture that has given us unrestricted abortions, unbridled pornography, a litany of sexually transmitted diseases and a culture a few meters this side of self-immolation. (I guess I have finally gone metric.)

It is also no odd coincidence that Betty Friedan, “the Mother of all Feminists” was a Cultural Marxist who was mentored by Herbert Marcuse.  He was the radical college professor of the 1960s and a refugee from the Frankfurt School who told our young people to make love, not war during the Vietnam era.  (It has always been my view that they should get married and do both.)  It was Mrs. Friedan who wrote the Feminine Mystique, the book that launched a thousand ships of marital discord and unhappiness.  I understand that thousands of divorce lawyers say novenas in her honor.

All this is important for the Catholic and Christian Churches…and anyone else who liked the culture essentially the way it was BM—before Marx.  Catholics had suffered persecution and discrimination for generations.  Signs, such as NINA—no Irish need apply—dotted the commercial landscape along the east coast.  Catholics so desperately wanted to be part of mainstream America but their allegiance to a “foreign power” and their “strange” rituals prevented them from securing a seat at the banquet table of culture.

Then along came the Kennedy family—rich, powerful, unscrupulous and hell-bent to make the starting team.  It was the patriarch, Joseph Kennedy who thrust his children into the political limelight.  When his second son John was elected president, Catholics celebrated in joyous anticipation that the culture would finally listen to them.  (My good Catholic mother voted for Nixon.)  Buffered by his “Irish mafia,” Kennedy’s presidency heralded the fact that Catholics were now part of the official power structure.

Just what affect has this Catholic arrival had on American culture? Look around!  Does our culture look like the Church has had much impact?  Who is winning the Culture Ware—Karl or Jesus?  Could it have something to do with the fact that Kennedy did his very best to dance away from his religious beliefs?  So is it any wonder that his sectarian successors have done the same?

Is it not possible that our Catholic leaders have been seduced by a modernist culture, not unlike Jenny’s parents in “An Education?”   Is that why most of our Catholic politicians in DC are pro-abortion? Has not the secular establishment with its feminist and homosexual lobbyists taken our college presidents to the woodshop of humanistic learning where “a plasma TV in every den” has replaced the “pie in the sky” of faith?

Modernism was a heresy that the Church condemned 150 years ago. I don’t think it was any different then from what it is today. Whether they call it health care reform or social justice, it is a raging inferno and its residue smoke is wafting through Catholic teaching, pastoral work and even the pulpit.  Perhaps what we seriously need is a new Church militant with its true Christian weapons of prayer, penance, self-sacrifice, and relentless charitable protest.  The alternative is that future generations will curse us amid their cultural ruins.

Here is another helpful post from Fr Dwight Longenecker on the reason for his leaving Anglicanism:

I’m often asked why I left the Anglican Church to become a Catholic. Was it women’s ordination or some other issue? Well, the debate over women’s ordination was an influence. It made me re-examine the question of authority in the church. I have written about my conversion several places, and these articles can be found on my website under the ‘articles’ tab.

However, the more I think about the reasons for my conversion, the more I realize that the real problem was not women’s ordination, nor was it, at depth, the question of authority in the church. Women’s ordination was a problem and the authority of Rome was the answer, but there was a deeper, underlying problem with the Anglican Church as I experienced it. The problem is modernism — a philosophical and theological position which is deeply opposed to historic Christianity…

Read the whole post on his blog here.

On page 114 of Foucault Live the French philosopher gives an example of the so-called schizophrenia of capitalism, its ability to integrate conflicting tendencies at its core, a process similar to what the situationists termed recuperation.

In the 19th century the university was the medium at the center of which  a literature said to be classic was constituted. This literature was by definition not a contemporary literature, and was valorized simultaneously as both the only base for contemporary literature and as its critique. Hence a very curious play in the 19th century between literature and the university, between the writer and the academic.

And then, little by little, the two institutions, which underneath their petty squabbles were in fact profoundly akin, tended to become completely undistinguishable. We know perfectly well that today the literature said to be avant-garde is only ever read by academics; that a writer over thirty has students around him who are doing their theses on his work; and that writers live for the most part by giving courses and being academics.

More than anything, this comment is valuable for our understanding of what literature is today.

Nån kritiker på Aftonbladet gör bort sig.

En sak har dock Kajsa Ekis Ekman (LOL @ mellannamnet) rätt i: Markis De Sade verkar inte ha varit en särskilt sympatisk person (enligt kommentarerna verkar dock Ekis bre på lite extra).

No shit. Han gav upphov till termen sadism. Vad förväntar man sig?

Att blanda ihop intentioner med innehåll med verkliga övergrepp med dikt med verkliga övergrepp med politisk agenda med litterära kvalitéer med personlig livshisoria är så jävla Burroughs- och Henry Miller-rättegångarna och fucking jävla videovåldsdebatten. Lägg ner.

Jag har inte läst mycket av De Sade, men vill minnas att de fyra herrarna i Sodoms 120 dagar som låter sina allra lägsta lustar löpa ut över de stackars slavpojkarna och slavflickorna faktiskt är en präst, en politiker, en general och en mäktig kapitalägare. Enbart en sådan sak försvårar läsandet av De Sade som något annat än en maktkritiker.

Nåväl, markisen kan svårligen försvara sig, men Vertigo Förlags Carl-Michael Edenborg ska lägga replik i onsdagens Aftonbladet.

Uppdatering 26/11: Här är Edenborgs artikel. Med några intressanta kommentarer, bl a:

Om De Sade har uppbackning av alla dessa monumentala auktoriteter, varför blir Edenborg så ursinnig av en enda avvikande kvinnlig röst?

Vad är auktoriteten hos en rad akademiker som få faktiskt känner till och läser jämfört med en självrättfärdig slaskartikel i Sveriges största dagstidning? Vilket har stört spridning i vår vardag?

Deadwing

KRITIKOS VOLUME 6

 Kritikos V.6, September-October-November-2009

Modernist Asylum Art and the Contemporary Consideration of Art…(g.coulter)

Kritikos TV: Kucinich and Nader on H.R. 3962…(n.ruiz)

http://intertheory.org/work.htm

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

I have mentioned before in an earlier post, Three Universes, there are essentially three levels of reality in our world.  God, who is not confined within his own creation, exists outside of the physical universe.  This makes him his own universe.  Within his domain, there exists our physical universe, which can be affected from without.  It is a lesser reality, being less absolute, not existing forever, and depending upon God for its existence.

Within the physical universe is another, lesser reality, called the mind.  That’s where we actually live.  The mind is even less absolute than the physical world, capable of spontaneous change, inconsistency and a certain degree of incongruity.  Yet, when we experience the physical universe, we do so indirectly, through reconstruction within our brains.  If any of the processes between the actual sensation and the final experience goes awry, then we do not experience the physical universe accurately.  Nerve damage or brain damage disrupt the transfer of information, and what we see no longer resembles reality.  We do not really have a complete grasp on the physical world.  What we really hold, completely, is the image in our minds.  What we experience is all that the universe of the mind contains.  Nothing can exist within the mind except that we are aware of it.  Similarly, nothing can exist within the physical world, except that God is aware of it.  Hence, God is omniscient.

The physical world is not a piece of God.  Nor is the mind a piece of the physical world.  The physical world is corrupt, but that doesn’t make God corrupt.  Similarly, anything can happen in the mind, but it does not escape the mind and infiltrate the physical world.  In fact, nothing in the physical world explains the mind.  Cognitive processes might be explained in physical terms, but not the mind, itself.  A computer thinks, but it does not have a mind.  The mind is as much its own universe as the one we live in, but in a lower fashion.

Now, I’ve said all of this before, but there’s something more to consider.  Before the industrial revolution, humans were grossly subject to the whims of nature.  We had not developed technologically enough to conquer our world.  In that era, through most of our history, we looked to God for the answers to our problems.  That meant that we looked outside of our minds, through and beyond the physical world to God for truth.  With increasing understanding, we became confident in our own power and began to look no further than the physical world for answers.  This was the advent of modernism.  This was also the birth of naturalism, the belief that all things could be explained through the physical universe alone, with no need of God.  We had conquered the world, and we became our own gods.  Technology was the answer for everything that ailed us.

When we sought understanding from God, we attempted to live our lives and order our world in his likeness.  That is, we strove to be godly.  It is no different than the mind attempting to resemble the physical world.  If the lesser world fails to resemble the greater one, then it becomes detached, and its survival becomes imperiled in the one that gets rejected.  If a man goes insane, he no longer sees the world as it is.  Functionally, he imperils himself in the physical world, because he is not firmly grounded in it.  The same is true for our relationship with God.  If we reject God and the supernatural, then we become imperiled in the supernatural.  That is to say that we risk death, spiritually.  For those who still don’t get it, that means Hell.

Modernism was madness.  We might think that what followed, the rejection of modernism, would be the cure to this problem, but it wasn’t.  Rejection of a lie is not necessarily the embracing of truth.  Postmodernism was a flight in the opposite direction from God.  Today’s movement is to seek truth no further than the mind.  Postmodernists don’t even look to the physical world for answers.  For them, there is no absolute truth, because the world that they draw truth from is a world lacking in absolutes.  The mind is not subject to such things.  You have your own truth, and I have mine.  The idea of God is not even on the table.  They’re two steps removed from the truth of God.  They worship whatever their mind creates.

Pre-modernists prayed for rain.  Modernists attempted to make rain.  Postmodernists criticized the modernists for causing climate change.  Where the modernists attempted to improve life through their own hands, postmodernists attempt to improve life by undoing everything that the modernists did.

Pre-modernists believed in the immortal human soul, absolutes and God.  Modernists believed that nothing would last forever, and there was no God, but at least there were absolutes.  Postmodernists believe in no God, no absolutes and nothing eternal, but they play with fantasies in their own heads.

Pre-modernists used the physical world to understand God beyond it.  They worshiped him physically, and they prayed aloud.  Modernists used their minds to understand the physical world.  Postmodernists are primarily concerned with finding themselves.

Now, this postmodern revolution is a religious one, also.  Modernists sought out the “God particle,” reducing God to physical circumstances.  However, postmodernists are a little peculiar, in that they can be just about anything that they want to be at any time.  One could easily attend church one hour and a Buddhist temple the next.  Some of them do exactly that.  Their belief system is not absolute, because the universe of the mind is not absolute.  In Christianity, we know them as the Emergent Church.  In reality, they have even less of a grasp on God than a materialist, who at least recognizes the value of the world that God created.  Had they at least grasped the physical world, they would have held to some concept of an absolute.  In truth, the Emergent church is less of a  Christian than a Darwinist.  They are even further from God.

Now, consider what I said before about sanity.  When a man’s mind ceases to relate intelligibly to the world around him, he is considered insane.  When we, with our lives, ceased to relate meaningfully to the God beyond this world, we took the first step toward our own insane demise.  Postmodernism was the second step, detaching us even from the physical world.  Society is gradually slipping into a state of insanity.  Perhaps this is irreversible.  Perhaps this is the end.  The real travesty is that the Church, which was meant to be the salt and the light of the world, has developed its own form of postmodernism, the Emergent movement.  The real blasted shame is that our own fellow “Christians” have betrayed us and the world to this madness.  They were supposed to be there with us to help stem the tide of this sickness, but they have stabbed us in the back.  The Emergent Church has chosen the same fate as the world.

Therefore, they are also condemned to a world separated from God, a place where he never goes.