This would be an excellent opportunity for me to offer my sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to the conference. Whether you made a large or small contribution, we are in your debt for what turned out to be a fascinating and thought provoking event!

In any event, we were busy. I was in Chicago with many of you at AAR. However, Aron seems to have joined that contentious group of protesters who haven’t quite come to terms with the AAR/SBL estrangement. Fear not, they’re getting back together, maybe even by 2011. Aron made up for his absence by attending the Chesterton Conference in Niagra, Ontario. Look for his paper to appear here soon once I steal it from his laptop.

I’ve recently become interested in the Bible again after reading Irenaeus’ Against Heresies and teaching the Revelation unit in my advisor’s Seminarian course a couple times.I’m currently writing a paper on the regula fidei, and at Joshua’s suggestion began reading up on some literary theory, including Northrop Frye (although I wonder what you had in mind when you made that recommendation, JADR). Anyway, I stumbled across this bit in Frye that made me laugh, and for lack of anything substantial to post at the moment, I thought I’d toss this one out there:

It took me some time to hit on the right formula for a course in the Bible. I consulted the curricula of other universities, and found that they gave courses called “The Bible As Literature,” which involved chopping pieces out of the Bible like the book of Job and the parables of Jesus, saying, “Look, aren’t they literary?” that approach violated all my instincts as a critic, because those instincts told me that what a critic does when he is confronted with any verbal document whatever is to start on page one at the upper left-hand corner and god one reading until he reads the bottom right-hand corner of the last page. But many people who have attempted to do that with the Bible have flaked out very quickly, generally somewhere around the middle of Leviticus.

- Northop Frye from Northrop Frye and Jacy McPherson, Biblical and Classical Myths

Like

Unlike

“We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”- T.S. Eliot

I have admired the greatness of Eliot as a poet, but never expected to use a bit of his work for a meditation of education such as this. However, it seems to me that this quote from Eliot is filled with profundity and enormous implications for our practice as educators and continuing students. I must say from the outset that my reflection on this quote is not an exegesis of Eliot’s poetry (though certainly such an venture is a worthy endeavor and has been embarked upon by interpreters much more able than I), but rather a contemplation of these words as they stand on their own, detached from the context of his work in which it is originally embedded.

I will begin with a memory. A couple years ago I made the routine visit to my hometown of Jamestown, TN where I was born and raised in the same house until I went away to college at the age of eighteen. While home on this visit I distinctly remember riding in the car with a family member, perhaps my dad. The road that we were travelling upon was a route that I had taken hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times in my life. It was the road from my family’s home to the center of town. About a mile into this route is a field, off to the left, which has cattle and much green grass in its midst. It is perhaps ten acres or so. What was so distinct about the memory is that, to my amazement, I noticed something about the field that I had never noticed before. What I saw was a patch, or perhaps angle on a patch, of trees that I had never noticed before. What struck me with such awe was the fact that I had been travelling this stretch of road almost everyday for the first eighteen years of my life and many times in the ensuing years and had never noticed this patch of woods! It taught me, or perhaps reminded me in a deeper way, that no matter how much we have partaken of God’s creation there is always more to see, touch, taste, and feel.

This “always more-ness” of creation is rooted in the fact that creation derives its being through participation in the Being and Life of the infinite Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So there is always more to any creature than just themselves. If we have eyes to see,ears to hear, and skin to touch we will find that creation and its creatures are iconic gateways into the infinite depth of God from which they draw life. Because this infinite depth just that, infinite, there will always more to contemplate, to learn about a person, a tree, a sunset, etc. For us as educators this means that we must never approach a class or subject we are teaching our students in such a way that we work under the assumption that we comprehensively “understand it” and intend to lead students to this same comprehensive understanding. Rather, if we are teaching the Interior Castle by Theresa of Avila, for instance, we must lead our students into the depths of Theresa’s text as fellow sojourners who are all students of Theresa. For Theresa’s text provides an iconic gateway into the life of the Triune God. We may lead students into the depths of Theresa a hundred or more times in our lives as educators but there will always be “another patch of trees to see.” There will always be the light of new dimensions, angles from which we have not ventured a look at Theresa’s castle, a fresh harmony we have yet to hear in her music.

I think this is perhaps some of what Eliot’s turn of phrase means for our craft as educators. We are to lead our students into continual exploration of the depths of our discipline, for there will always be new vistas, or at least clearer vision of what we are beholding. When we behold this new depth of our subject matter we must pray for the grace to always and ever “arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.” No doubt that we and our students will find ourselves at times at the point of satiation, believing like the (cynical) laughing Sarah and Abraham, that we “know the deal.” Geriatric age couples do not have children and one does not encounter fresh dimensions of truth in texts that have been read for hundreds of years and which we have read over and over. And yet this small imagination of Sarah, Abraham, us, and our students shows not a lack in the depths of our subject matter, but a failure in our ability to imagine and encounter a world in which we will ever journey into fresh knowledge. This is so for this world, and the disciplines of study which lead us into exploration of this world, find their being and life in the Being and Life that is beyond all category of being and description…the infinite ocean of love and joy that is the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As teachers and learners may we be given grace by this God to “not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”

Like

Unlike

2008 Religion and Literature Forum, April 4-5, 2008
Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York

The Grotesque and the Sublime in Contemporary Culture

The 2008 Religion and Literature Forum will explore contemporary culture through the category of the grotesque and its convergence with the sublime. The grotesque evokes a variety of associations: strange, remarkable, tragic, terrible, diseased, Other/other, terror, terrorism, absence, chaos. Encounters with it evoke affective and cognitive responses analogous to elemental religious experience: fear, vulnerability, fascination, attraction. It is both captivating event and disruptive process, constructing and deconstructing identities, redrawing borders and shifting margins. The grotesque is, finally, transformative and apocalyptic as it draws out the hidden and unmasks the familiar.

Plenary Speakers

Amy Hollywood
Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies, Harvard University Divinity School, Speaker Bio

Karmen MacKendrick
Professor of Philosophy, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York, Speaker Bio

About the Conference: Call for Papers; Working Schedule

Like

Unlike

For Lacan, Catholicism (and Rome) was closely linked with psychoanalysis, and if we look at the success of Lacanian thought it is mostly in the Latin and Catholic countries, Italy, Spain, France, and all over South America. I think there have been Japanese psychoanalysts, but the question I want to ask is, what is it about Japan that causes a difficulty, whether for the religion or the analysis closely allied with it? I will just venture one answer here, which I hope others will add to: by virtue of the doubleness of the writing and speaking system, the Japanese subjectivity does not become oriented around a center (a quilting point in Lacanese, or perhaps even the phallic signifier) but always takes on two centers. Now while this might be more “honest” in a way, just like this is the truth of our solar system’s elliptic orbits whose planets actually spin around dual centers, both of them off center (Lacan liked this and said that Kepler was more valuable than Copernicus because the latter never got over the fantasy of a controlling center), but it also never establishes a certain mode of truth-seeking that demands reconciliation and repentance at a singular altar, that demands universalization of language and being at the origin and end of all things. If the Western psyche has a clearly established One, it also (per Lacan) can define the lack and crack of that One, which is where we get the sense of split subjectivity or crucified self. If one is double from the beginning (for language and being are co-terminous) the problem is not that one can’t be One, but that one can’t fathom the split.

Like

Unlike

First, Janet quotes my early comment, and then responds to it:

“Rather, I think of it like participating in the sacraments. Our relationship to God through the church is starved if we deprive ourselves of the sacraments. Likewise, if we refuse to participate in the world in a way that conforms to our end, we lose something of the sacramentality of being in the world.”

Yes, I agree with you you about this “participation.” I suppose this is why Father Rodrigues was willing to hear Kichijiro’s confession and have him live with him in his little community.

The question, I suppose, is abut the forms and the realities, the letter and the spirit. How do we recognize charity or grace — or legalism or the spirit of death — when the labels start to get switched around. And as both Jesus and Paul warned, the labels of love and grace do get turned around and applied to phariseeism instead, over and over again in the history of human institutions….

I made my comments about grace (vs works) in relation to p. 187 when Inuoe says that Buddha always forgives, but in Christianity “you also have to be strong.” And Father Ferreira thinks, he doesn’t understand Christianity at all. I think this is the challenge of the book to Christians: to think toward the depths of how far divine forgiveness and love might extend. For Father Rodrigues, this is what is revealed for him when Jesus breaks the silence and speaks to him from the fumie…. Always it is the cross that is the ultimate silence, and speaking, of God. How do we “hear” the cross; what does it say to us?

So, do you think Inoue is right, that we “have to be strong” in addition to receiving God’s compassion and forgiveness? The sacraments are an interesting mention you made, because they are essentially means for receiving grace and love…. It’s hard to think of them as a kind of works or “being strong”….

I think I mostly agree with Janet. We definitely want to affirm emphatically the gratuity of salvation and theosis/deification. I’m not completey satisfied, however, that the “receiving” aspect of the sacraments entails or necessitates an complete passivity in practice. Hence, the idea of participation in God’s life seems to indicate a unique activity on our parts. I’d want to see a recognition that there’s human action in the sacraments and the church as well as Divine action.

It seems clear that Inoue does not understand this aspect of the Gospel, that Christ on the cross unltimately inverts human strength, as Janet mentions. But, once this revelation is made, we are called to receive the divine life. Yet we ought not dichotomize the divine action and the human action, as this would lose the meaning of participating in divine life that we are blessed with first in the church and then in heaven. So, it seems that, intrinsically, there is an aspect in which we are called to be “strong” as Inoue says, but this strength is not his strength but rather the strength of the cross, of the Father who sends his only Son to identify with his creation in a radically and sacramentally active yet vulnerable solidarity, thereby renewing and representing the creation link between God and those made in the image of God.

This is only my reading. Are there any other thoughts on this. Janet, how does this sound to you?

Like

Unlike

As premodern as Dumbledore appears to us, with his flowing beard and ancient wisdom, we need to see him as the quintessential split subject; but inasmuch as he lives out the victory of love over death, he is the split subject that makes it, that lives not in this world but in the next (where Harry last sees him) and when he was in this world, lived as if in the wound of Christ. There is a picture from Flanders which shows believers bathing in the blood pouring out of Christ’s wound. Then another from Caravaggio which shows Thomas poking his fingers into this wound. We must remember that this wound characterizes not the living body of Christ, but the resurrected body, the spiritual body that lives beyond death. Zizek calls this body un-dead, but this is needlessly shocking. We don’t know much about this body, but we do know that it is neither given or taken in marriage, and that, sexually, it is like an angelic body. But we also know that our spiritual bodies are given us in a wedding feast. So are they sexualized or not? Is the love that grapples with death and wins (like Jacob did) in any way sexual? In some religions, Mormonism as well as Islam come to mind, the afterlife is seen in some ways as like the family life we know here. Heterosexual intercourse is mentioned, encouraged, and it seems that children play a part as well. We cannot say this about our tradition, and yet our language is perhaps the most sexualized, what with marriage feasts, brides and bridegrooms, consummation, etc. So what kind of sex are we talking about? And if the beatific vision is the consummation of all our desires, clearly that includes erotic desire (I don’t think any decent theologian would argue with me here). It is clear that Christians tend to be feminized in regards to Christ, but Christ also takes on something feminine–the slit in his side, that bleeds not monthly but continually. This split of course heals Adam’s wound through which Eve was born, and in gushing both water and wine, found the church and its sacraments (as well as its fantasy in the grail which caught this shower), and I think the picture of the Christians bathing in the blood which flows from this slit are seen to take on the saviour’s new sexual characterics. Which is . . . . what? He is not given or taken in marriage, but he bleeds, he loves, and of course he enjoys, forever, his desire is fulfilled in gazing at God and at uniting with his adopted children.

So is the resurrected body gay, or feminine? We need to be careful here, but we can say that in passing through death this body’s sexual wound has profoundly changed. It is no longer a source of division (etymologically sex means simply division) but a source of unity. The elect are erotically bonded to each other. What all this goes to say is that the sexuality of the Christian is profoundly changed, and I don’t believe this has ever really been considered. What does it mean to be feminized? What does it mean to be erotically bound to each other. What does it mean to be perfect, and yet still to bleed, to be wounded? Homosexuality is an issue now because the gay person is a witness to this. I’m not saying that all Christians would be more honest if they were gay. I’m saying that homosexuality brings the topic to the forefront. Etymologically again, gay of course means happy, but what if we see this person to be happy not because they just bought a killer sweater, but rather because their sex is no longer divided but resurrected? Again, homosexuality brings this question to the place where it can no longer be ignored, which is why, as much as intellectuals hate to dirty their hands in hopelessly dualistic debates on issues “which are not of primary importance (didn’t Rowan Williams say something like this?), it is time to realize that the wise among us (hint, Rowan) need to make this topic their own, and no longer leave it to the hungry ghosts and ravenous dogs of mindless debate.

Like

Unlike

Janet has invited us to read Shusaku Endo’s Silence with her in this advent season, partly as an opportunity for Episcopalians to reflect on the situation within the Anglican Communion. This from her site:

Right now, we Episcopalians find ourselves in a place where the same diametrically opposed interpretations of our actions are being offered us. How can we know for sure? We have to trust in the God we know. I have never thought that the real question is, does God exist? No, the real question is, who and what is God?

And the question, who is God, what is God, is also the question: what have I found in my journey that compels my allegiance and is worthy of my deepest devotion?

I think this could be a worthwhile conversation and experience to participate in, regardless of your orientation to the CofE dialogue or your particular denominational affiliation. So, I hope you’ll join in; I just got my copy today from CUA’s library. Looks good.

If you’re like me and have never read Endo before, I found a short anthology of his work called Stained Glass Elegie that looks pretty interesting, and contains a story that was an early development of the protagonist in Silence. Further, I found these other blog posts and essays (1, 2, & 3) on Silence that might give you an idea of the book, although they won’t give you the experience of reading it in community that you’re going to get reading it with us, so be warned against decided solely on the basis of an essay or synopsis.

Like

Unlike

Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffers, who rule this people in Jerusalem! Because you have said, “We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an agreement; when the overwheliming scourge passes through it will not come to us; for we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter”; therfore thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I am laying in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation; ‘He who believes will not be in haste.’ And I will make justice the line, and righteousness the plummet; and hail will sweep away the refuge of lies, and waters will overwhelm the shelter.” Then your covenant with death will be annulled, and your agreement with Sheol will not stand; when the overwhelming scourge passes through you will be beaten down by it. As often as it passes through it will take you; for morning by morning it will pass through, by day and by night; and it will be sheer terror to understand the message. For the bed is too short to stretch oneself on it, and the covering too narrow to wrap oneself in it. For the LORD will rise up as on Mount Pera’zim, he will be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon; to do his deed–strange is his deed! and to work his work–alien is his work! Now therefore do not scoff, lest your bonds be made strong; for I have heard a decree of destruction from the Lord GOD of hosts upon the whole land.

In the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone (or Sorcerer’s stone, as the American version has it) Harry is the only person who can destroy the famed alchemical rock which grants eternal life to its bearer. Rowling clearly means to make us think of the philosophical ramifications of this rock, for she uses the name of a historical alchemist, Nicholas Flamel. Voldemort wants the rock of course, because his only goal is to never die (He’s like Woody Allen, who said: I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality by not dying). Its very simple and most of our daily actions probably betray an inner Voldemort–we quite frankly want to escape the scourge of the rock of ages, the rock of the corner, the rock which the builders rejected. For as we read in the Gospels this rock crushes those upon whom it falls, and breaks to pieces those who trip over it. This is the death which beckons Harry over seven books. Why is he the only one who can handle, and destroy, this powerful rock? Because he is the only one who is not attracted by its lure. It should be noted here that the alchemical rock, the philosopher’s stone, is not the true corner, but it is the epitome of man’s version of that stone. Luther would call it works. The Catholic Catechism calls it the sin against the Holy Ghost. Bonhoeffer called it cheap grace. It’s my rock, and I hold it up as a talisman against the Everlasting Rock which would crush me. It is the rock of knowledge and science, something I try to get across in my Death & Dying class, in connecting the fall of alchemy with the rise of modern science, whose final goal is to evade death, to replace old organs with new ones, to reprogram the self-destruct mode of our genetic code.

But He makes “righteousness the plummet” not immortality. The showdown with Voldemort in that first book is very instructive. Where does Harry finally find the rock? In the mirror of Erised, the mirror in which your deepest desire and fantasy is revealed. The Harry that he sees in the mirror slips the rock into his pocket, and at that moment the real Harry feels its weight. Harry’s deepest desire is for this man-made rock, but only to destroy it. It is almost as if Harry himself is the true rock, for the goal of this rock is to destroy the other one, or to be destroyed by it, as the prophecy has said, “neither can live while the other survives.” And when Voldemort (or the Voldemort that has infested Quirrel) reaches out to slay Harry, Harry’s body, which has been infested by the love of his mother, the carrier for this true rock, causes Voldemort’s carrier to crumble into dust.

Voldemort has made a “covenant with death” a covenant to flee from it, and thus we have the ambiguity that he is one who flees death, and yet his followers are death eaters. Whereas Harry is destined to destroy death but only by succumbing to it. It is the difference between the two rocks, but until Harry has made the final sacrifice he is not really sure which rock he belongs to, at times he thinks he is Voldemort himself. This is consistent with the work and deed of the true rock which is “alien” and “strange.” Voldemort only desires more of the same and thus by fearing death he spreads it and its sameness relentlessly. There is also in Harry a desire to make things remain, to stop the ravages of death and time, but stronger is the strange urge to make things new, to be faithful to the end of things, to let them die before they live again. This is why the immortality of those around Harry who have died is not sentimental, but shows forth a Paschal truth.

Like

Unlike

‘My labor pains have begun’ (Romans VI). So Ignatius advances to the torture and humiliation of his death in the confidence that there in the arena his true life, his humanity, his reality, begin. The truth has appeared in human flesh and suffered human death and thereby created afresh for all humanity the possibility of ‘truth in its flesh and its death, of a real and stable (‘incorruptible,’ in Ignatius’s languge) life constituted by what the world seees as meaningless–silence, failure, death.”

What does Jesus do? He takes death into his flesh like a cancer and defeats it by dying, by dying as only God can die. As only one who was chosen before the foundations of the world can do. Ignatius and Barth agree here, that Christ is elected from the beginning to take on death at the hands of his own creatures, to deliver all of humanity from the episode in which death has the final word. God’s love knows no limit, and neither does His pain. We should all read the new book out on Mother Theresa which details the depth of her own dark night, which she is very specific about, and which lasted more or less her entire adult life. She died in it as well.

Harry is also chosen, of course. There is a prophecy concerning him, that he must be the one to defeat the dark lord–Voldemort, he who is a flight from death (if we translate literally from the French). I think we could also translate it “theft of death.” So Harry, by dying, defeats the one who is afraid to die. Harry’s capacity to love is explicitly linked several times with his ability to overcome the fear of death. In fact, Harry seems, from the first book ready and willing to rush in headlong to death. I would even say he has a death wish early on. What he cannot come to grips with is that he must let his friends die as well, and even worse, die for him. This a nice turn, for although Harry is the one who must die for others, his struggle is really ours, the Christian struggle, to accept the fact that someone died for us, simply, to accept love. And this is where life drops out for us, because all we know of life is the neverending judicial mess of justifying our own refusal. It is much easier to be unloved, because we can use this injustice to rail away at the world around us. We can use it get out of bed in the morning and snuggle into beer at night. To be loved leaves one, frankly, with nothing to do. It’s quite boring. (People sometimes ask what the next taboo will be if the 19th c. had sex and the 20th had death. I vote for boredom).

I thought Lana’s definitions of virus were quite interesting, so I quote from her comment: Viral meaning contagious and constantly mutating? Yes, this is the way that language is perpetually unhinged, ruled by chance, which is the law of life that has conquered death. Viral meaning an endless possibility for re-writing using the same letters put in different sequences? Yes, this is the way that the Word is limited, by a historical life and death, and by a particular amount of phonemes human equipment can conjur. Viral meaning that the biological mechanisms of the host–our cells and everything that makes us ourselves–are invaded because they’re essential to the reproduction and proliferation of the word? Yes, this is what Eckhart means by giving birth to Christ, having a virgin heart to birth a pure savior.

While Burroughs perhaps looked with suspicion on this viral word–I think he always valued his art more than his words–for us this Verbum-Virus is an anti-cancer, an alien agent infiltrating a body of death. It achieves new birth when we let ourselves by inspired to create a new body in which this true drama (this lucky lie!) hits the body of language with seismic force, knocking the dictionaries clean off their shelves. This is what Rowling has done–and she was inspired, just read about how she got the plot for all seven books in an instant, on a train. She let herself be infiltered by this alien truth, this truth of God’s which no man can know, and no man can attain, except that he make himself a virgin heart to birth a virgin boy.

I want to go through the Potter books one by one, so stay tuned for a look at alchemy and the rock of life.

Like

Unlike