The (very very) bad dude in No Country for Old Men is presented as our male hero: brave, loyal, trustworthy, unafraid, and most important of all, true to his word. He must kill an entirely innocent victim just because he said he will. He doesn’t enjoy evil for its own sake, but he simply performs what evil deed he must in order to live up to, even sacrifice himself for, some higher principle. He clearly enjoys his evil deeds, but whence cometh this enjoyment? We ask the same question about him that Augustine asked about himself when he remembered the theft of the pears, which he did not do because the pears were good to eat, or for any other reason, but simply to indulge in the shame of the act. Augustine actually doesn’t give us a good answer as to why he commits his crime–it is clearer in the film: Sigur Anton (bad dude) is the last man around, the only character with character, strength and values. A true hero, and yet when he crumbles into a puddle at the end of the film there shines a ray of something totally different, in the irrational refusal to live in his world of a cute girl who works for Wallmart, we see the beginnings of a glory on the far side of the American man.
Archive for the 'Culture' Category
Well I’m sure glad that Dan keeps himself on the theology, thus justifying this as a theology blog, cause I would like to write about Dracula tonight. I just finished Bram Stoker’s wonderful (and big) book, and then watched the Coppola film version of it. The movie is so-so (who the hell did Keanu Reeves sleep with to get these roles???); the big change Coppola makes is to throw in a love story between Count Dracula and his youthful love (way back in 1460 something). Due to Turkish treachery she commits suicide, the church (Romanian Orthodox I think?) shouts blasphemy, her soul is to rot in hell, and Dracula commits himself to evil. A little cheezy, but it actually pays off in the end, for Coppola then has the 19thc. Dracula fall in love with the British Mina, who is basically a reincarnation of his ancient Romanian darling. At the end Mina redeems the Count and sends his soul to heaven, which, though the the love story is not in the book, is pretty true to Bram’s plot, in which Mina emphasizes the save-ability of the vampires (of course they are saved by having their hearts run through with a stake and their heads chopped off!). This is, of course, the Faust myth, and a surprisingly reliable duplication of it. For even though Faust sells his soul to the devil, and messes pretty seriously with some good German souls, at the end he still gets into Paradise, due to Mephistopheles getting distracted by a cute boy angel (!!no kidding!!). I’m sure people have written scads on this topic, but what is probably less noticed is how close Harry Potter fits into (and I would argue, nicely completes) the Faust myth. Especially as concerning Dracula, in which Rowling borrows the device of the good guy and the bad guy having a telepathic communication (Mina and Dracula, Harry and Voldemort). Mina also wears a scar on her forehead where she is burned by the host, due to her burgeoning vampire blood, which cannot bear the sacrament. There are many other parallels as well, but the main theme, I believe, is the importance of redeeming the devil figure. Whether it is Milton’s Satan, Goethe’s Faust, (hell, even the damned in Dante), Frankenstein, Dracula, or Voldemort (and Snape too), it is the possible redemption of these devilish figures which really lights up these texts. I think Rowling does a great job of addressing this in her final book with the wailing baby figure which shows up in the sequence in King’s Cross station, clearly at least part of Voldemort’s soul. This is perhaps her most poetic moment. . . . In all these literary creations death and life are maddeningly enmeshed but what separates them can become razor sharp as well. There is a big difference between a dying life (that maintains itself in love as it struggles with death, as Jacob with the Angel {of death?}) and a living death, the undead, nosferatu, which, in a mockery of life takes blood to perpetuate its unliving undying death. All these Faust myths have a bit of that Germanic moral tone as well, in that we must, as Christians, look very carefully at what it means to be granted immortal life. Does it mean we have power over death, power to never die, power to rule nature and disease? Or is it perhaps the gift to die in the name of love, which is what God means by life, but we misunderstand him sometimes. . . .
A few of us here at TLOU just got word that we’re presenting at the LeMoyne College Religion and Literature Forum in April. AD and JDR will be talking about Cronenberg’s films and I’ll be talking about Andy Goldsworthy and Victor Vasquez. I’ve copied the details from the website below.
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
One of the most haunting aspects of Silence is the sense you get that Christianity meets its match in this land of “swamp.” That here we have a group of islands whose rockiness has proved inpenetrable to the truth of the cross, and the blazing sword of God’s love. Strangely enough, I just read that Lacan said the same thing about this land, but that he said it concerning psychoanalysis, that Japanese people couldn’t be psychoanalysts because of the way their writing system could be read in two completely divergent ways. That is, the on-yomi and the kun-yomi, two different ways of reading Japanese Kanji (characters imported from China–this of course isn’t even mentioning the two different syllabaries also used in everyday writing, whose doubleness perhaps images the dual readings of the kanji). In other words, you could have the very same kanji that would be pronounced completely differently depending on the mode of reading you were using. Before I knew this, but after I studied a very small amount of Japanese, a language which for English speakers is a cinch to pronounce but a bitch to read, I also droned on to my World Religion classes that the Japanese were fascinating because they could be in two places at once, they could be completely traditional and completely modern/techno/industrial/secular at the same time. In the West, I said, we felt torn between those two options, whereas the Japanese pulled it off so naturally, the way they might design a insurance building according to the ki streaming down the mountainside or start the baseball season off with a Shinto blessing. There is a certain nonchalance about everything in Japan, a confidence that anything can be Japanified, any word absorbed into the language, that they have the secret to digesting everything. Of course, this is the complaint in Silence, that Christianity has just become another variant of Japanese thought, that it was some kind of seed not mentioned in the parable of the sower, the seed that is planted but becomes genetically modified and grows into something else! Continue reading ‘Things that are Impossible in Japan’
As many of you know, Janet has begun the discussion of S. Endo’s Silence over at deepgraceoftheory. Here at TLOU, we’d like to investigate some of the more technical aspects of the theology behind Silence. So today, through the magic of cut and paste, we’re going to direct your attention to Janet’s and my conversation that we hope to continue here.
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. Continue reading ‘The Sacraments and Silence’
Recently J.K. Rowling revealed that she always thought of Dumbledore as gay, and that he had fallen in love with the (eventually) evil wizard Grindelwald as a youth, which partly explains his ideological mistakes made with that wizard. The revelation came when a student asked her if the headmaster who always spoke so highly of the power of love had ever fallen in love himself. I think that this is an opportunity for a wise person to say something about the current debate on homosexuality in culture and church, esp. in the Anglican communion. Unfortunately, I will speaking on the matter instead.
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?
Continue reading ‘Invitation to Read Shusako Endo’s Silence’
Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe is an explosion of cultural throwbacks and cinematic contortions, not to mention Beatle’s hit after hit, “like endless rain into a paper cup”. But it’s not simply vintage nostalgia. Buried in the plot is a power struggle between two deep human urges that bears theological fruit in its reflection of Love as a pole averring, mediating factor that ultimately funds the best of human efforts.
Early in the film, Taymor appears to squarely pit social and militant activism and artistic creation against each other, and gives the impression that the infamous Love will side with the latter. It’s only an impression, and one that many on both sides mistakenly take to as the final word for better or ill. On one side, there’s the declaration of fealty to an ambiguous and numinous Love, the great fictional panacea. On the other, there’s the concession that Love is indeed ambiguous, impotent to effect change; the there’s an argument for the need for something else, something more jarring, even violent. And thus we have the polarization of the 60s set before us: the peaceful, inward, even insular arts culture on one side (Woodstock par excellance); and the boisterous and often violent activist movement concomitant and strangely akin to the oft harsh and violent government (Kent State/Vietnam). And then, in wake of this “revolution” there’s the late 70s and 80s, perceived by many, and certainly portrayed in the film, as the waning of Love and meaning – “You know, it’s gonna be alright, yeah”. Continue reading ‘Is All We Need LOVE? A prolegomena to future discussions on Love and Being.’
If the Enlightenment and subsequent periods of modernity have done anything to alter what it means to be human, they have set humanity at a distance from the world, positing a radical degree of separation between the created order and Aristotle’s rational animals. Where God factors into this rift, and how one structures the dialogue between Philosophy and Theology, depends largely on how one schematizes God in relation to Being. It was Hans Urs von Balthasar who adroitly drew out the ramification of the human mind’s prodigality when he said, “[T]he human person himself would stand as the synthetic element, not only between [Church and world/Faith and Reason], but secretly above both.”1
- HUVB, “On the Task of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time,” Communio 20 (1993): 148; although von Balthasar was not the first or last to issue this warning.↩
That’s the claim made by Preaching Without Contempt: Overcoming Unintended Anti-Juadaism (2006), a short volume by Marilyn J. Salmon, NT prof at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. Salmon stakes the claim, following recent Pauline scholarship, that the Gospels are inherently Jewish texts, that Jesus’ Judaism is at the core of his mission, and that a good deal of Christian hermeneutics, theologizing, and subsequent preaching has notoriously failed to recognize such.
Continue reading ‘Inadvertent Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology? A Reading Group Proposal’
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