Joel Garver, a prof at LaSalle, has an insightful writeup over at his blog, Sacra Doctrina, on the state of children and violence in Philadelphia. Apropos our last conversation here, read his post if you get a chance. The information comes from the Report Card 2007: The Well-Being of Children and Youth in Philadelphia, “the city’s annual analysis of the overall condition of its youngest citizens.” Despite the sad results, I agree with Joel’s suggested plan of action: fasting, prayer, and service.
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Archive for June, 2007
Happy Father’s Day to all of you fathers and father/parent figures. God bless you and may your children recognize what a wonderful gift they have in you. May you experience God’s peace and happiness through your children.
Throughout the week, I haphazardly meditated on the idea of parenthood quite a bit. Aside from my direct connection to Father’s Day as a parent, I was privy to some really powerful experiences of parenting. Moreover, having recently read Balthasar’s meditation on a mother’s love and glance toward her child being the child’s awakening to the world, to the very idea of a “thou”, I had a helpful framework upon which to interpret my experiences. Continue reading ‘Father’s Day’
I’m halfway through Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, so let me begin by saying that if you respond to this post, please don’t blow the ending for me before I can watch it.
I put Kurosawa off for years. Don’t ask me why. I love nearly everything on the Criterion Collection, so much, in fact, that I have been plotting for about three years now to own the whole collection someday. When Borders has its teachers weekend, it’s all Kate can do to keep me from buying whatever Criterion films borders happens to accidentally still have, like the original Solaris, wedged neatly between Snakes on a Plane and Spartacus, or more Ingmar Bergman. And while it’s not a Criterion film, I’m probably the only person who owns the Decalogue who is still tempted to buy it every time I see it in all of its boxed-set glory. Continue reading ‘Seven Samurai: Do I see a self-sacrificial act on the horizon?’
The presentation on Love Alone went well, despite several factors of my own making. I did record the presentation, although I think I sound really stupid, say “um, uh, ok” and alot of other dumb things. But if there’s enough demand, I could be persuaded to post it, or email, or something with it. So, to recap, I gave a bit (about 15 minutes) of bio first, and then worked my way into the text (see Friday’s post for my introduction to the text). Balthasar’s critique of the cosmological method went over like herbal tea, which I found surprising as that’s the one thing I think he dismisses too quickly; I’m holding out for a place for cosmology (I guess that makes sense as I hope to be deeply immersed in Balthasar’s doct. of creation by this time next year). The group, as much comprised of by parishioners as university faculty, found Balthasar’s treatment of such themes as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modern biblical criticism highly contestable. As I said in Friday’s post, I feared as much; how does one compress a book which was already the author’s compression of his own work - 7 volumes at that - much less the philosophical and theological background one needs to comprehend Balthasar on even an elementary level. Moreover, writing in 1963, vB was writing from a specific perspective, addressing a set of specific problems arising from the split with Rahner. I imagine his motivation came not only from a pure intellectual interest, but also a desire contribute to the greater movement surrounding Vatican II, seeing as how he wasn’t invited to attend by his Swiss bishops. Some of the concerns raised about the critique of the Anthropological method - its gross gloss and homogenization of Reformed, Renaissance authors, and modern biblical crit - can be explained by looking to the relevant Herrlichkeit volumes for Balthasar’s engagement with the primary texts. But even then, as I mentioned to a friend last night, Balthasar writing in the sixties, didn’t have some of the tools we do today, with Kuhn writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions only a year earlier. Moreover, his area of work kept him pretty firmly ensconced in either confessional theology (e.g. his attempts to dialog with Barth) or germanic literature, although he does bridge out to French literature. I don’t have the breadth of knowledge to make Balthasar able to stand up under the scrutiny of modern philosophy of science or post-structuralist concerns. Continue reading ‘Love Alone Recap’
Sunday I’ll be walking the parishoners of St. Marks’ through some rudimentary tidbits of Balthasar’s scheme, such as the analogia entis and his book Love Alone as a bitesized version of his Herrlichkeit, The Glory of the Lord. I photocopied a couple pages and the conclusion today in preparation for the class. As I did so, I was struck, as so often before, by the sheer volume of Balthasar’s corpus, and briefly by the futility in presenting Balthasar’s project in 45 minutes. But what I like in time and comprehensiveness, I believe I’ll make up in ambition and excitement.
Love Alone itself is nicely structured and lends itself to a quick presentation; although, maybe not 45 minutes-quick… The layout is simple:
I. What is the core, essential aspect of Christianity? “What is specifically Christian about Christianity?”
A. Not its cosmology
B. Not its anthropology
C. Rather, “God’s message is theological, or better theo-pragmatic. It is an act of God on man; an act done for and on behalf of man–and only then to man, and in him. It is of this act that we must say: it is credible only as love–and here we mean God’s own love, the manifestation of which is the manifestation of the glory of God.” (7-8) And so, Balthasar here inextricably links soteriology and aesthetics via Revelation. Continue reading ‘Love Alone: the marriage of Theology and Aesthetics’
The Chicago Reader Film Blog has a cool post about the use of the supernatural and cosmic in the latest Pirates of the Caribbean. The post asserts that while some of the imagery is borrowed from the french director Eric Rohmer, especially the green flash symbolizing the transference of a person from this world to the other, the film ultimately fails to plumb the depths of the supernatural to which it sets out. I agree. On a purely symbolic level (we won’t even discuss the quality of the film), many images are introduced, but, like many of my high school students’ essay, the movie fails to seal the deal. The introduction is given, a lot of irrelevant details are used (presumably) as supporting evidence, and the conclusion predictably is a happy one although divorced from the deep, spiritual elements. One feels as though one has been shot by Dick Cheney’s shotgun, left with nothing else to do but apologize for being there in the first place.
Which brings me to the movie I really wanted to talk about today: The Fountain, directed by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream). If you want to get really fucked up tonight, go out and rent this gem. Aronofsky, unlike Verbinski, seems to recognize that what matters more in the fantasy genre is drawing the audience in with the question of the supernatural, not the assumed, unexplored premise of the supernatural. “We’ve seen it all. It’s not really interesting to audiences anymore. The interesting things are the ideas; the search for God, the search for meaning.” This is where Pirates fails, not so much because it lacked the “ideas”, but because it seemed to be unaware (inasmuch as a movie can be unaware or aware) that it even had the ideas…. maybe that’s a little harsh.
The Fountain, on the other hand, is bursting with the ideas and the questions. The imagery is overflowing, yet understated. Rather than throwing many different images on the screen, they return to the same imagery throughout the film, exploring new aspects, letting the chaos settle as the story nears its conclusion. I really appreciated the way the question of the supernatural didn’t fight death, but embraced it, unlike Pirates where in the end the main character managed to evade death for the moment. Whereas Pirates of the Caribbean advocates an uneasy truce with death, the Fountain’s main character takes a 1000 year voyage to finally be at peace with his and his wife’s death, the end of the book.
I’m watching The Fountain with an 11th grade AP English class tomorrow morning. I’m afraid it may be a bit heavy for them, but they’ll at least get exposure to religious imagery in film. So, I’ll let you all know how it goes.
Last week, I posted a photo of Johnny Depp, from his role as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean III. As a result of my inclusion of that photo and the current interest in the movie among the masses, TLOU has received a crazy number of hits this week. So, if you’re new to this blog, and even if you’re just here for the photo of Johnny, welcome. Hopefully you’ll stay for the content, which I’ll admit is not usually along mass-media lines.
AD and I are in the midst of a unit on Theology and Art in the adult education at St. Mark’s. Yesterday, AD presented Auden’s Ars Poetica, The Sea and the Mirror, a continuation of sorts of the Tempest in poem form. AD had originally hoped to record it and post it here, as our first podcast. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, but I think he plans to share an outline and/or some of the more salient points of the discussion - maybe he’ll even share one of his Auden songs with us, so there may yet be a podcast!
I’m up next Sunday with a discussion of Balthasar’s opus proposal, which I was delighted (and somewhat chagrined after reading a heft chunk of the Herrlichkeitto find nicely summed up in Love Alone. Per Caritatem has hosted a cool series on Love Alone, so please visit her. I’m really interested in Balthasar’s turn to the irrational via the concept of Love to explain the core of Christianity and delineate the task of the theologian. So, I hope to share some of that with you all over the next few days (as I come up with it).
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