Nimble Spirit

New at Nimble Spirit

2007-12-15T20:13:00.000-05:00

Just added at Nimble Spirit (in our never-ending quest to actually show up with something NEW once in a while!):

A Special Selectionfor theChristmas Season:

Tala's Gift by Paul Nicholas Mason.

Mason, a Canadian raconteur with a touch of Garrison Keillor, Jean Shepherd, and Gamble Rogers about him, is the author of Battered Soles, three plays, and the forthcoming novel The Red Dress.

Also, a few new book reviews:

Hush: An Irish Princess' Tale by Donna Jo Napoli
The Cure by Athol Dickson
One Hundred Great Catholic Books by Don Brophy

Best wishes for a great holiday season and new year.

Many thanks for your support of Nimble Spirit.

Nimble Spirit at Gather.com

2007-09-19T20:41:00.000-04:00

A new Nimble Spirit feature, "Nimble Spirit at Gather," is now available at Gather.com. Follow this link to the Nimble Spirit at Gather web page and follow the instructions to join Gather (FREE) and participate in or start a conversation.

The first post at Gather is the following. Join in and put in your two cents:

At some time or another most of us have been challenged to name our “desert island” choices: What music or book would you want to have with you if you were stuck indefinitely on a desert island?

Well, Nimble Spirit has this question for you:

If you were stuck indefinitely on a desert island, what 3 pieces of spiritual literature—fiction, nonfiction, scripture, poetry, whatever—would you want to have with you?

Send your answer to the nimblespirittalk group at Gather.com, and include 3-5 sentences about the reasons behind each of your choices. Let’s see how many books and authors we can turn one another on to.

Remember, you can visit Nimble Spirit: The Literary Spirituality Review, anytime.

New at Nimble Spirit

2007-09-04T19:46:00.000-04:00

Review
Epiphanies & Elegies by Brian Doyle

Several years ago Brian Doyle told me that he’d like to publish, when he’s about eighty years old, a collection of the little poems he has made and found and tossed into the ether over the years but that won’t amount to a critical mass worth publishing till he’s at least that old. Apparently someone talked him into pulling those pages together about thirty years ahead of schedule, and we should be glad they did. Read the Review

Review
On Kingdom Mountain by Howard Frank Mosher

Somewhere along the line a few years ago I picked up a copy of Howard Frank Mosher’s novel In the Fall of the Year. I think it was at a book trade show. It was maybe another two years before I actually cracked the book open and read it, then smacked myself on the head and asked “What was I waiting for?,” and undertook to read the rest of Mosher’s work. Read the Review

New at Nimble Spirit

2007-07-08T11:58:00.000-04:00

Review
God’s Echo by Sandy Sasso

About midway through her eminently accessible and perfectly tuned little book, Rabbi Sandy Sasso recounts a tale from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s childhood. When the future scholar, sage, and ecumenist first heard the story of the binding of Isaac, he began to weep inconsolably. “But, rabbi,” the future co-worker of Dr. King asked his teacher, “what if the angel had come a second too late?” Read the Review

Review
Roots and Wings by Margaret Silf

. . . Be not afraid, Silf tells those who are devoted to Jesus. Neither of science, nor of empirical evidence, nor of hard questions, nor of your own imagination. “Do you think creation has ‘peaked’ in homo sapiens, or are we going farther?” Before addressing questions like that, Silf says, Take a deep breath, stay calm, go only as far as you’d like. Read the Review

Review
The Poetics of Space and The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard

Bachelard’s powers of meditative reflection and his profound reverence for the physical world deepened self-awareness about how I experience a dwelling and the significance my dwelling space has for me. Read the Review

Curators of Meteorites, Inspectors of Snow-Storms

2007-06-04T15:45:00.000-04:00

It tickled me, perhaps more than one might expect, when I read that the author of a column on the back page of the British Catholic weekly, The Tablet, “is the curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory.”

Tickled as I was, I turned to the friend sitting beside me, showed him the author bio, and said, “Charles, can that really be a fulltime job?”

I’m a job-seeker these days, so I guess I think that way sometimes.

Help Wanted: Large institutional religious organization seeks curator of meteorites.

Help Wanted: Archivist of tree bark to organize collection of Protestant sect.

Help Wanted: Buddhist dot.org seeks indexer of creeks and streams.

And then I thought of that old pal of mine, Henry David Thoreau, and some of the “jobs” he had in and around Concord, Massachusetts and the pond called Walden:

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.

It felt good to read that again.

[For a bit of Thoreauvian fun, click here.]

The Book on Tech Support

2007-05-28T21:59:00.000-04:00

Just for the fun of it. . .

Cosmology Cavalcade

2007-05-25T20:49:00.000-04:00

I had the privilege to be involved in the making of a brand new book by John Kotre titled The Story of Everything.* In this little book, John uses an extended parable to find a way by which the “competing” cosmologies of religion and science might better coexist. The The Story of Everything is a unique, compelling, and welcome addition to the literature that deals with this aspect of the “culture wars” that plague our society.

Stories of ultimate beginnings have always fascinated me. That there are so many of them is no surprise, given the diversity found on the planet in terms of geography, climate, and general living conditions. One could hardly expect peoples, preliterate or otherwise, to come up with common expressions of their origins when day-to-day experience ranges from Arctic ice to Saharan desert to Amazon rainforest to Rocky Mountains. Life experience at the 65th parallel will undoubtedly lead to a different cosmology than that at the equator. The cosmology of people who are enslaved will be different from that of those who enslave them. And then science brings its own vast set of empirical observation to bear on our exploration.

John Kotre revels in the diversity of stories and the way we pass them from generation to generation. In The Story of Everything he explores religious and scientific cosmologies, and, by way of parable, creates a new cosmology that is traditional, contemporary, mythological, and scientific.

To support this effort, John has created a website called The Story-of-Everything Place (www.thestoryofeverything.com). Here, he invites discussion of his parable; but more importantly, he invites readers to share their own stories of everything. The Story-of-Everything Place is bound to become a sort of cosmological bazaar where people can bring the stories they’ve been told since they were children, as well as create new stories.It’s a big universe, worthy of many stories. John Kotre is giving us all a chance to join in the play of it all.

*If you click on the Amazon link, don’t be put off by the slightly different title; a late alteration by the publisher has apparently not been updated in the various bookselling databases.

Nonfictioned to Death

2007-05-23T15:10:00.000-04:00

In his piece “Why I Wrote The Seeker Academy as a Realistic Novel,” posted recently at Nimble Spirit, L. D. Gussin observes:

Nor is today’s secular art of much apparent use to counterculture forces that care most about political change. A member’s manual for The Network of Spiritual Progressives, an outgrowth of Tikkun Magazine, has a reading list for study groups that are pursuing a spiritualized politics. All sixty recommended books are nonfiction—there is no fiction, poetry, or drama. Yet a similar study group of a century ago would surely have been reading Dickens, Tolstoy, Ibsen, etc.

I sometimes feel as though I am being “nonfictioned” to death. Facts, opinions, punditry. Whether it’s CSPAN’s admirable BookTV, or the authors featured on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, nonfiction seems to be the star of the book show. And when that happens, the upshot often seems to be the kind of go-nowhere shouting match that’s been the stock-in-trade of talk radio since the 1980s and has spread like kudzu to the 24/7 news networks, public-access cable, and, no doubt, Memorial Day picnics and the local bus stop.

Come on. Tell me a story.

If you want, for example, to explore the faith/reason, sacred/secular dichotomy, you couldn’t do much better than to read Chet Raymo’s In the Falcon's Claw: A Novel of the Year 1000, in which an Irish monk accused of heresy for denying miracles faces a world in which end-of-millennium superstition rivals that of the lead-up to Y2K just a few years ago. It’s entertaining and instructive and will keep you turning the pages late into the evening.

But you can’t soundbite it. And Chet’s a nice guy who’s not really pushing an agenda; he’s exploring the world in all its complexity and nuance. He won't be likely to get into a shouting match on CNN or Fox News with James Dobson or Bill Donohue. So instead we get Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and their nonfiction cohorts versus the above-named and their cohorts.

It gets a little tiresome. Come on, tell me a story.

I’ve written elsewhere about how reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five when I was 16 influenced my worldview, especially around topics of war and peace and violence. And very little nonfiction can hold a candle to a Charles Dickens underdog like Nicholas Nickleby overcoming the machinations and abuses of his money-grubbing Uncle Ralph. Even the most well-intentioned action-item email from your favorite dot-org, on the left or the right, is not likely to get your dander up the way a good story will.

Stories take time. You might have to sit still for a while to take a story all in. You might have to hear it or read it twice or more. You might have to tell it yourself in order to see it more clearly.

Stories can be looked at from many angles, just as facts and statistics can be, but, unlike the latter, it’s tougher to make a story say what you wish it would say. A story sets its own terms and it won’t ring true if it’s manipulated for purposes other than its own. Religions are made from piles and piles of stories. Theologians and religious power-brokers like to whittle the stories down to dogmas and rules—the who, why, when, where, what of faith and spirituality—but they fail to do justice to the stories when they reduce them so. Jesus may very well “save”—who knows?—but the story of Jesus is sure as heck salvific.

Do yourself a favor. Tell someone a story.

New at Nimble Spirit

2007-05-20T18:14:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Literary Spirituality:
Why I Wrote The Seeker Academy as a Realistic Novel
by L. D. Gussin

The Western spiritual-based counterculture called variously new age, holistic, human potential (its first name), east-west, integral and mind-body-spirit took direct inspiration from major Western literary figures. Yet, during most of its fifty-year history, literary critics have dismissed it as a subject—even while, as a maker of meaning, the movement reaches many more people than do literary works.Read the essay

New Poems in the Nimble Spirit Poetry Gallery:

Martin Burke, Robert Elzy Cogswell, Kim M. Baker, Fred Allen, Tom Gibbs, Leonore Wilson, Duane Tucker

Review
Short Trip to the Edge by Scott Cairns

An acclaimed poet and a Baptist-raised convert to Greek Orthodoxy, Scott Cairns proves himself to be an engaging companion in this account of his pilgrimages to Mount Athos. His goal, to experience “genuine prayer, prayer of a sort I could only suspect, and desire” is a worthy and elusive one. Read the review

Review
Grace Period by Gerald Haslam

Gerald Haslam’s reputation as a writer seems to have limited general knowledge of his work to folks out West. Born in Bakersfield, California, he was raised in that state’s Great Central Valley, and much of his work has been set there. But, like writers such as Wendell Berry of Kentucky, Haslam takes on issues and situations that transcend specific places but are effectively grounded by the concreteness of those places because of the author’s love of his place and his ability to share it with readers who have no firsthand knowledge of it. Read the review

New Reviews at Nimble Spirit

2007-05-03T16:53:00.000-04:00

Review:
Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison

The characters Jim Harrison imagines are largely untamed by suburban ways of life. Even as they enjoy their meals and notice sublime scenes in nature, one notes that Harrison’s creations have not been smoothed by money, business, fashion, or technology. Haunted and challenged in a number of ways, they struggle against themselves and against one another in settings of rural isolation. Read the review

Review:
The Red Thread by Roderick Townley

The Red Thread tells a story that covers a period of 500 or so years and in which the heroine, a present-day sixteen-year-old student and photographer Dana Landgrave, discovers through dreams and hypnosis that she has lived two earlier incarnations, and that events in those lives continue to have implications in her life in twenty-first-century New Hampshire. Dana’s story grabs you from the beginning and is hard to put down . . . Read the review

Review:
Saving Erasmus by Steven Cleaver

In Saving Erasmus, his brief and breezy first novel, Steven Cleaver tells the story of Andrew Benoit, a recent seminary graduate facing a choice between a big-city assignment and something that feels like banishment to a small town. True to the idea of “call,” like a modern-day Jonah, Andrew finds himself in the small town of Erasmus facing a daunting first assignment: Heed your call to be a prophet and save the town immediately, for the Angel of Death is set to destroy the faithless place in one week. Read the review

What's Up with Nimble Spirit

2007-03-08T12:55:00.000-05:00

I’m sure that many of you have noticed that there hasn’t been much new activity at Nimble Spirit lately, so I’d like to offer a bit of an explanation.

As you may be aware, Nimble Spirit is largely the work of one person — me. I have help from a handful of volunteer writers and friends and contributors, but getting it done depends on my being able to find the time and energy to pull it together.

Over the past several weeks, going back to November of 2006, I have been preoccupied with the task of finding a new job. Back in 2003 I relocated my family from Minneapolis to the Boston area to take the job of editorial director of a publishing company owned by a small religious order based in Cambridge. The order was yearning to grow its audience, its sales, and its offerings. All of which were good goals. It took some time to get all the pieces and personnel in place to effect the company’s turnaround. But a year into the 3-to-5 year turnaround that the monastics had so deeply desired, at a time when the work of the staff was beginning to bear noticeable fruit in sales figures and in the company’s raised profile, the monastics suddenly changed their priorities. Rather than work hard to grow a vital business, the monastics decided to focus their efforts on quickly raising millions of dollars through donations so as to make infrastructural changes to their buildings, as well as add on to those facilities. So the fewer-than-twenty men who make up this monastic order, which is financed by a rather healthy endowment/portfolio and has its donated HQ on a piece of donated land that would command a price in the many many millions if it were to be commercialized, put four hard-working professionals out of their jobs, alienated dozens of authors, sold their inventory and most of their forthcoming book contracts to another publishing entity, canceled other contracts, wiped their hands of it, and put their noses to the grindstone of getting money for nothing so they can improve the manner in which they live behind the cloister wall.

So I’m looking for a new job.

The past few months have been filled with that activity, along with working for the monastics up to the bitter end to effect as good a transition as possible for the sake of the books and their authors. My time has also been filled with an intense experience of grieving, of dealing with the utter sense of being betrayed by colleagues while trying to maintain a professional demeanor with these individuals just the same.

I consequently have not had much energy for adding material to Nimble Spirit, and I apologize to readers who have come here hoping for something new. I hope to get back on track soon, and I am also working on a business plan with the goal of taking the site to the next level and perhaps create something really quite special, with more interactivity and a variety of additional types of content. All of this goes on in the context of staying sane and making ends meet — and going through my resume umpteen times and writing umpteen cover letters to go with it and viewing site after site of job listings, etc., etc. I hope to be able to report soon of success of some sort or another, as well as get Nimble Spirit moving again. Thanks for your patience, your interest, and your support.

Another Great Crazy Dog Production

2006-10-28T19:14:00.000-04:00

Infidel
By Roger Gregg
Presented by Crazy Dog Audio Theatre
Available for download at ZBS
Go to www.crazydogaudiotheatre.com for more information

Following on the success of their prophetic radio drama The Last Harbinger, Ireland’s Crazy Dog Audio Theatre has gone from the futuristic to the historical with a new production of Infidel by Crazy Dog founder Roger Gregg.

Infidel takes place in the early 13th century during the Fifth Crusade. In the context of the factual history of the Crusade, Infidel tells the fictional story of brothers Hugh and Philip of Beauvais, and Omar, the youngest son of the sultan and to whom Hugh becomes a tutor and unlikely friend.

As one would expect from the players and technicians at Crazy Dog, Infidel is an outstanding achievement on the levels of acting, directing, and production. A visit to the Crazy Dog website affords behind-the-scenes views of the production process, complete with scenes recorded at night in the rain and on location with galloping horses (no Pythonesque coconuts in this production!).

The care and professionalism with which Crazy Dog makes its state-of-the-art radio drama bespeaks the importance of the lessons Infidel offers contemporary listeners about the reality of culture clashes and the absolute necessity of dialogue and tolerance. Infidel has all the elements of great drama—high-quality writing, acting, and production. As a piece about war and religion, Infidel offers a unique angle on the familiar story of the Crusades: a pair of brothers who go together to the Crusades but find themselves in conflict; an unlikely friendship between enemies; the just-outside-the-viewfinder presence of an Italian ascetic from Assisi who preaches the God of love in the midst of soldiers acting on behalf of the God of war. This compelling play succeeds on the levels of historical authenticity, commentary on contemporary issues, and sheer entertainment. Highly recommended.

Look for a review of The Last Harbinger at www.NimbleSpirit.com

The Angelic Doctor

2006-06-11T19:10:00.000-04:00

by Chet Raymo, from www.sciencemusings.com (June 4, 2006)

A half-century ago, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, Thomas Aquinas ruled the roost. If you were a student at a Catholic college or university anywhere in the world in those days you were probably required to take a course or two of Thomistic theology. The Angelic Doctor's massive, multi-volume Summa Theologica stood as the rock-solid foundation of Catholic education.

Aquinas's method is to state a thesis, raise objections, then refute the objections. My problem was, as an undergraduate, that I usually found the objections more cogent than the thesis or refutations.

The Summa is clearly a monumental achievement of the human mind, and I am glad to have been exposed to it, as I was exposed to Aquinas' 13th-century contemporary Dante Alighieri. But although I return often to Dante, I left Aquinas behind. I fail to see what relevance a natural theology based on an Aristotelian or medieval world view has to our own times.

Reading Thomas Aquinas for natural theology is like reading his contemporary Johannes de Sacrobosco for astronomy: interesting as history, but not terribly relevant to contemporary thought.

I recall a time when I was a young graduate student in physics at UCLA and attended a talk at the Newman House (the Catholic chaplaincy) on the morality of artificial contraception. My wife and I had started a family, and could have used somthing besides "rhythm" to help us achieve the family we wanted. But alas there was something called "the natural law," so forcefully articulated by Aquinas, that put contraception out of the reach of "good" Catholics. I struggled to understand what this "natural law" stuff had to do with the laws of nature I was learning in my science classes. It seemed perfectly natural to me that a young married couple in the mid-20th century might not want a child every year ad infinitum, and that human intellect was a gift not to be wasted.

When I began teaching at Stonehill College, students of philosophy used as a text Thomistic philosopher Vincent Edward Smith's The General Science of Nature (bearing, of course, the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur designating doctrinal purity), which had about as much to do with modern science as did Sacrobosco's astronomy -- and an impenetrable prose style to boot. How much more exhilarating it must be for young Catholics today to go to the philosophy of science section of the library and find books by Thomas Kuhn, Richard Dawkins, Gerald Holton, John Ziman, Lewis Wolpert, Steve Fuller, and many others who know contemporary science from the inside and who appreciate why we now live in a universe of galaxies and DNA rather than a universe of angels and demons. The writers available to our present students would be appalled to have anyone's imprimatur of doctrinal purity.

So I leave Thomas Aquinas where I found him those many years ago on the sagging shelves. But also in those early days I read the great spiritual writers of Christian Europe: Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, John of the Cross, and others. Their celebratory spirit has stayed with me, and transcends any particular theological formulation (even Buddhists feel at home among the Christian mystics). Eckhart, for example -- a contemporary of Aquinas and fellow Dominican -- considered every plant, every stone a revelation of the divine. He was not quite a pantheist, but neither was he an orthodox theist (he was condemned as a pantheist by the official Church); that is, he did not identify God with the visible world, but neither did he imagine a God who exists outside of creation. Eckhart's God and the creation are inseparable: all things in God, God in all things. This may be the stuff of Inquisitional nitpicking, but it represents a tradition of joyful creation spirituality that rests more comformably with modern science than do Aquinas's volumes of verbal boilerplate. No less a philosopher than Hegel thought Eckhart a reconciler of science and faith. The contemporary spiritual writer Matthew Fox, himself an ex-Dominican, says of Eckhart; "[He] is an Aquinas with imagination, an Aquinas freed of too tightly woven Scholastic language, an Aquinas in poetry."

Of course, the Thomists shoulder on, although they have lost their commanding position in Catholic education, still hoping to find more wisdom on the sagging library shelves than in the creation itself. The Times Literary Supplement recently reviewed a book by the Thomistic philosopher Jean Porter on the foundations of ethics in natural law. The review is quite favorable, but I confess to being as baffled by Thomistic discourse today as I was half-a-century ago. I quote from the review: "Where nature is understood 'more as nature,' we have in view the way in which, as Porter puts it, 'every creature manifests certain orderly patterns of action, simply as such -- to be, to maintain its existence -- and in addition, every living creature manifests further, more complex patterns, for example, orderly growth and reproduction.' These 'intelligible structures of natural processes' provide the basis for the 'properly rational activities of the human creature...", and so on. Whatever this means is beyond the ken of my poor rational faculties.

Further Reading

My book Honey From Stone, recently reissued by Cowley Books, is an attempt to show that the ancient tradition of creation spirituality in Western Christianity is not at odds with modern science. Granted, the people I quote there -- Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Richard Rolle, and the rest -- lived in a different world, with a very different understanding of nature and God, but their responses to the world -- attention, celebration, and a profound awareness of the thing that cannot be spoken -- are not unworthy of our own time.

Meister Eckhart seems to have been deeply influenced by the Celtic (druidic) tradition of creation mysticsm that I have written about in Climbing Brandon: Science and Faith on Ireland's Holy Mountain. Irish monks were instrumental in establishing schools along the Rhine Valley, Eckhart's homeland.

Dixie Flak: Eight Thoughts

2006-05-28T21:12:00.000-04:00

1: I’m a big fan of the Dixie Chicks, make no mistake about it.

2: In 2003, when Natalie Maines made an anti-Bush comment during a concert in England, I was glad to hear an American citizen exercise her First Amendment right in a way that was critical of the U.S. president.

3: Given my support of the First Amendment, I would expect citizens who wish to exercise it to feel free to express their agreement or disagreement with Maines, and I would support that expression.

4: Agreement or disagreement is one thing; an out-an-out campaign of hate-speech against Maines and her colleagues is another. Comments referring to the Chicks as “sluts,” “whores,” and “Saddam’s bitches” were out of line. Death threats crossed the line entirely into the realm of unprotected speech.

5: When Maines made her statement, Bush’s approval ratings were quite high. For several weeks and months now, his ratings have been extremely low, 30 percent and below. Make of that what you will.

6: Now that the new Dixie Chicks album, “Taking the Long Way,” has been released, the media is all over the album and the group. The album takes on, straight on, the reaction of fans and the press to Maines’s statement and the ensuing flak. The first single from the album, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” considers the possibility of “forgive and forget,” a possibility that is made remote by realities such as “It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her / Daughter to hate a perfect stranger,” and threats of violence. Some might think the song is combative; the press apparently does. On “60 Minutes” Steve Croft conducted an inane interview in which he asked the Chicks over and over but with slightly different wording each time, if they had not “betrayed” their fans with what was said two years ago and now with the new album. Kalefa Sanneh, writing in the New York Times, concludes that the Chicks “shouldn’t be too surprised if some fans jeer – angry, but also disappointed – as they walk off the court.”

For one thing, I don’t think people who have received death threats and have been called names such as those mentioned above need to worry about betraying fans. Real fans continued to show up: The Chicks’ “Top of the World” tour continued in packed houses even after Maines’s comment had become right-wing talk-show fodder. And any artist who will tailor the product simply to satisfy the marketing department’s concern about certain “jeering” fans isn’t worthy of the designation “artist.”

7: There are two kinds of music: Good music and bad music. “Taking the Long Way” is very good music. It’s not a “country” album. If it’s not played on “country radio,” too bad. That’s country radio’s loss. None of the albums the Chicks have released since the addition of Natalie Maines as lead vocalist – “Wide Open Spaces,” “Fly,” “Home,” and now “Taking the Long Way” – are country albums. The Chicks have consistently transcended category and drawn their audience from multiple demographics. The group’s history as a bluegrass band and its primary instrumentation notwithstanding, the Chicks and country radio have very little in common. There is a lot of bad music played on commercial radio, and some good music. Wherever you can hear the Chicks on commercial radio, you’re hearing good music.

8: It’s true that the lyrics of the songs on “Taking the Long Way” (all of the songs were co-written by the Chicks) are quite challenging and point fingers at what the authors see as hypocrisy and confusion in America today. In “Lubbock or Leave It” Maines sings “On the strip the kids get lit / So they can have a real good time / Come Sunday they can just take their pick / From the crucifix skyline.” But if you listen to the album from start to finish (which is perhaps a rarity in our buy-by-the-song iTunes world), you end up with “I Hope,” a sacred song co-written by the Chicks and Keb’ Mo’:

Sunday morningI heard the preacher say
Thou shall not kill
I don’t wanna hear nothin’ else
About killin’ and that it’s God’s will.
’Cause our children are watching us
They put their trust in us
They’re gonna be like us
So let’s learn from our history
And do it differently

(I hope) For more love, more joy and laughter
(I hope) We’ll have more than you’ll ever need
(I hope) We’ll have more happy ever afters
(I hope) And we can all live more fearlessly
And we can lose all the pain and misery

That’s the Chicks’ destination on this album. Yeah, they have to work throught some stuff to get there. Don't we all? But they get there.

Duncan's New Must-Read Book

2006-05-13T13:35:00.000-04:00

God Laughs & Plays
Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right
by David James Duncan
Triad Books, 2006. Xxvii plus 230 pages.
www.triadinstitute.org

Reading about religion and society can be tedious, infuriating, and comical. Some writers, convinced that “it’s my way or the highway,” elicit a full range of reactions. There is nothing more annoying than certainty in a world in which one might drop dead from causes internal or external at any moment. There is nothing more maddening than dogmatism based on questionable readings of ancient texts written in now nearly-dead languages. There is nothing more tragically comical than listening to churchmen twist themselves into pretzels to justify immoral “moral stances” or to “discover” the Christian message in some vapid pop song, like Karl Rahner claiming “anonymous Christianity” for good people who have never heard of Jesus Christ.

Sometimes I just get damn tired of reading about religion.

But not when David James Duncan is doing the writing.

Duncan, one of America’s best writers, has written God Laughs & Plays, a book that is likely the most important book on religion this year, perhaps this decade. Responding to what he calls “the preachments of the fundamentalist right,” Duncan, with passion, compassion, and a powerful intellect that is characterized by grace and humor, takes on the dehumanizing fundamentalisms that plague our world, threaten it with wholesale destruction, and give insult to the very notion of God.

Duncan has a pedigree that gives him ample credibility. “I was born a chosen person,” he begins, into a family of Seventh-day Adventists, “an Apocalypse-preaching, Saturday-worshiping fundamentalist sect.” He walked away from the church at the earliest opportunity, as a teenager, but Duncan had an abiding sense of the spirit.

Intense spiritual feelings were frequent visitors during
my boyhood, but they did not come from churchgoing
or from bargaining with God through prayer. The connection
I felt to the Creator came, unmediated, from Creation itself.

Along with developing a strong sense of “the Presence of God,” Duncan has engaged in “three decades of intimacy with the world’s greatest Wisdom texts.” While he is not associated with any particular religion, Duncan is hardly a secularist. His knowledge of world scriptures and the personages and sages of various traditions easily exceeds that of the average self-identified denominationalist as well as some of their most famous and infamous leaders.

Having been raised in a fundamentalist household, Duncan does not yield to the temptation of negativity and venom toward fundamentalism that many on the sociopolitical left are unable to resist. He has written with great love and affection of his grandmother and mother, the “strong women” who raised him in Adventism and in some way gave him gifts of character that allowed him to grow into the man, artist, and critic he has become. Duncan thus speaks with authority when he says:

Fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews are
armed, so they each believe, with the One True Book. But they
are four different books, and the four faiths are also each armed
with nuclear weapons. No form of fundamentalism from the
Ayatollahs’ to John Paul II’s can defuse this fatal impasse, because
every fundamentalism believes it owns the One Book, One God,
and sole faith. At the same time, no secular philosophy addresses
the fact that we’re born alone and die alone, and naturally
seek the solace of divine truth amid our mortal suffering.
Though the faith traditions offer this solace, I would argue
that they are able to do so only quietly, and only humbly—
and the recent fusion of fundamentalism and politics is
destroying this quiet humility. This is why I feel that the
great religious traditions stand in need not of a secular
turning away, but of a compassion rebellion against the
“certainties” of cocksure zealots claiming to own each
tradition. The fundamentalists of every faith remain
blind to the truth that “the sigh within the prayer is the
same in the heart of the Christian, the Muhammadan,
and the Jew.” I have seen this unity with my eyes, heard
it with my ears, felt it with all my being. Let those who
haven’t grumble, if they so choose. The world’s major
faiths are not identical, but they are alike enough in
ultimate aim that those striving to love, emulate, and honor
Jesus, Muhammad, Rama, Shakyamuni, and Abraham have,
in many times and places, proven themselves able to live
side by side in peace.

The project of God Laughs & Plays (the title is from a quote by Meister Eckhart) is to explore the unity that Duncan claims to have seen, heard, and felt. And explore it he does, in the exuberant and eclectic fashion that readers of Duncan’s novels, stories, and essays have come to expect of him. Duncan ranges far and wide, utilizing personal experience from childhood to the present; fly-fishing and environmental activism; his readings of world scriptures; and the teachings of the many masters he has discovered in his lifelong mystical journey with God, humans, and nature. Essays such as “What Fundamentalists Need for Their Salvation,” “When Compassion Becomes Dissent,” and the stunning “Assailed” should be required reading for anyone interested in the state of religion today—and that should include every citizen who intends to form an opinion or cast a vote in an election anytime soon. All of the pieces are filled with eye-opening gems of insight that make God Laughs & Plays a most informative and entertaining read.

But reading and enjoying are not enough. Those of us who do not wish to see the world overtaken by the fundamentalism of any religious tradition will do well to hear Duncan’s words as a call to action, action that begins with taking a stand in favor God’s creation and the multiplicity of God’s self-expression in the universe. Duncan himself makes liars out of those religionists who believe that spirituality without commitment to a particular religion (“spiritual but not religious”) is a low-grade substitute for the adherence demonstrated by true believers, and that only the latter are capable of participating in the in-breaking of the kingdom of God. God Laughs & Plays will make you think and laugh, it will upset you, it will make you say “A-ha!” dozens of times, and it will restore your faith in the idea of faith in a world in which too many of the “faithful” are rabid participants in the tearing down of the world and hearts and minds that God has given. This book can help turn the tide.

Fiction Fictions

2006-04-30T23:06:00.000-04:00

As a person who works for a small, independent publishing company, I’ve followed the story of 19-year-old Harvard University student Kaavya Viswanathan with more than passing interest. Viswanathan, the story goes, received a half-million dollar advance for two books that would fall, as I understand it, in the chick-lit genre. She was 17 when she signed the contract with the once-venerable Little, Brown & Company. Viswanathan’s agent, the powerful William Morris Agency, had already brought into the mix a book development company called Alloy Entertainment to help with conceptualization, and the word from Little, Brown is that they had heavier hands-on with this than with most of their books, but all maintain that Viswanathan wrote every word herself. Still, Alloy shares the copyright with her, and presumably a good share of the advance, which implies a deep level of creative involvement on the part of the development company.

All of this would be no more than a questionable business deal were it not for the fact that the resulting novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, was soon after publication found to have “borrowed heavily” from the work of novelist Megan McCafferty, with something like forty instances of direct or indirect parallels and occasional use of exact words from McCafferty’s novels.

The story has been hashed and rehashed, and Little, Brown has belatedly done the right thing by pulling Opal Mehta from the market. Whether they, Viswanathan, or Alloy will pay any further price remains to be seen. What concerns me is the practice of using a development house, rather than an author-editor relationship, to develop this writer. A publisher with the cachet and track record of Little, Brown must certainly have in its employ, or at least in its editorial Rolodex, an accomplished editor who could act as coach and mentor to a young writer they believe has promise. Granted, the development house was brought into the picture by Viswanathan’s agent. But certainly, in putting out half a million dollars, Little, Brown could have insisted on having some say as to how to develop the book. The option to stick with Alloy indicates that their desire was not to develop a writer but to develop a package or brand. I referred to Little, Brown above as “once-venerable”; if this is what they have degenerated to, if they have forgotten that publishers publish not books, but authors, then they have dropped several notches in my estimation.

Much of the talk about Viswanathan and Opal Mehta has centered on the size of the advance. Saavya Viswanathan is clearly a talented, articulate, attractive young woman. In the business of creating celebrities, half a million dollars is a drop in the budgetary bucket when you consider the costs of celeb-making reality TV shows and of making non-entities like Paris Hilton into household names. It seems to me that Viswanathan’s publisher and agent saw an opportunity to cheaply create a brand-name celebrity, and in their haste for a return on their investment they failed in their due diligence to ensure that the product was original and did not infringe upon the rights of any other author. There is no excuse for this sort of disrespect for artists and the abuse of the sound publishing principles that should be used to bring artists’ work to the marketplace.

I’m not saying that Saavy Viswanathan is not culpable, or that she is an innocent victim in all of this. But it seems to me that unsound and unscrupulous marketeers got a hold of this young woman’s talent at a time she should have been apprenticing with some of the great writers available at Harvard and in the larger Cambridge community. That opportunity may be lost to her for good. I’m sure that the money people at Little, Brown, William Morris, and Alloy, however, will simply lick their wounds, then their chops, as they go on the prowl to find the next subject for a star-making exploit.

Christian Fiction Fictions

I spent April 20-23 at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the bi-annual Festival of Faith and Writing. The Festival boasted about 1,900 attendees and a roster of writers, artists, and musicians that included keynoters like Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie, and Alice McDermott, along with talks, interviews, and conversations with Mary Doria Russel, Lilian Nattel, Ellen Kushner, Tony Hendra, Barry Moser, Luci Shaw, and so many others that I can’t even remember without my Festival guide in front of me. This was my second Festival, having gone in 2000, and I look forward to attending again in 2008.

An important topic that came up in at least one session, and in side conversations with colleagues from other publishing houses and with writers, agents, and academics, had to do with the category of “Christian Fiction”: what it means and how it challenges the work of smaller, independent publishers that are based in particular Christian denominations.

You’ve seen “Christian Fiction” in your local Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million (but probably not in your independent bookstore). It consists of books such as the Left Behind series, romance novels with a Christian flavor, historical fiction with a Christian twist, and inspirational novels. To put it more bluntly, the rapture crapture books and moralistic sappy crappy tales. It’s the section, if you’re at all like me, that you don’t want to be seen in.

Many years ago I was in an acting class when a fellow student asked the professor a question that had to do with the difference between “professional theater” and “academic theater.” He stopped her before she could finish the question and said, “There are only two kinds of theater: good theater and bad theater.”

The same thinking applies here. There is good fiction, and there is bad fiction. That’s all.

It apparently simplifies the life of Barnes & Noble-ites (the folks who work there and call the shots, not the innocent victims known as their customers) to pigeonhole books in this way. When a small Christian publisher’s sales rep visits B&N, he or she gets a handful of minutes with one buyer; and given that most of the books in the rep’s bag are in the Christianity department, the choice is to see the buyer for Christian books. Any fiction in the rep’s bag is relegated to the Christian Fiction section by default, even if it is good, solid, literary fiction. If, for example, a Christian publisher were to bring out Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead in the contemporary marketplace, these books would be lost to Christian Fiction, buried betweens stacks of LeHaye, Kingsbury, and Oke. Neither would likely get the attention that garners a Pulitzer. Go figure.

I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as an empty-headed way of doing business. Throughout 2,000 years of Christianity we’ve seen plenty of “Christian fiction” (e.g. Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Hawthorne), so this is not a new phenomenon. And LeHaye et al. do not come at all close to representing the full range of Christian theology, practice, and spirituality. Presenting these authors, with their niche-Christian points of view and, uh, not-so-good writing as the flag-bearers of an unnecessary category is theologically dishonest and just plain old bad marketing. We can only hope that the retail geniuses will figure this out and get back to selling fiction—whether good, bad, or ugly—from a single place in the store.

A Genuine Page-Turner

2006-04-14T16:02:00.000-04:00

The Burning Time
By Robin Morgan
Melville House Publishing, 2006. 347 pages.

Green, such defiant green! At the bleak heart of winter,
this brazen, shameless green! No wonder they call it the
Emerald Island, he thought, peering through light fog
at the emerging coastline, verdant even in
January, though as veined with snow as gemstone
faceted with light.

The Inquisition, or the Burning Time, comes to Ireland in the year 1324 in the person of Bishop Richard de Ledrede, late of the papal court in Avignon, a man who is despite himself impressed by the view of “brazen, shameless green” that greets him. His target, he soon ascertains, is Lady Alyce Kyteler, a noblewoman in the Kilkenny environs who clings to the old pre-Christian ways, is highly educated, treats her serfs as human beings, and has no patience for the outsider’s intrusion: “Best to return to Avignon or Rome or wherever you keep your pope these days, Bishop, and tell him to leave the Irish in peace.”

Alyce is a self-described “Daughter of Celtic Queens, Healer of the Sick, High Priestess of the Craft of the Wise,” and she is no light adversary. Neither, of course, is de Ledrede, and the trajectory they bring to this fact-based novel makes it compelling, hard to put down, and anything but predictable.
The Burning Time is at once epic and intimate. Though it takes place largely within a span of several months, it offers the reader the wide sweep of time, manifest in the pre-Christian traditions of the Irish colliding with the new way imposed by the church, a collision that is centuries in the making and will have centuries of ramifications. It also gives the reader the privilege of a close-up view of the rituals, stories, poems, and potions of the Wiccan community and of the women and men who populate it — Alyce herself, Petronilla de Meath, and Annota Lange and others. Morgan’s extended portrayal of the celebration of Lugnasad Eve, from the high priestess’s self-anointing before the gathering to the final feast, is remarkable, spirited, celebratory writing. Her careful development of her characters, including de Ledrede, puts flesh and bones on a tale drawn from the historical record left by Hollinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (a source, the author reminds us in an afterword, drawn upon as well by none other than William Shakespeare).

Morgan, the noted feminist and author of many books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, deftly draws the picture of a woman- centered social structure at odds with the male-centered Catholic church. There are dangers inherent in this sort of writing, those of didacticism and seeming to push too hard on a contemporary agenda. But anytime Morgan seems to be drifting in this direction, her characters and plot bring The Burning Time back to the fourteenth century and its joys and perils. Morgan’s peasants and serfs are three-dimensional human beings who grow and change under Alyce’s tutelage to the point that they become their own masters. In lesser hands Bishop de Ledrede would have been a mere straw man, but despite a fanaticism that could have been easily caricatured, he is a man of intellectual and emotional power and prowess who is fearsome even apart from his connection to the dominant power structure. The inevitable clash of wills leads to a heart-wrenching outcome that few readers will anticipate.

Intriguing parallels between Alyce Kyteler’s times and our own are plentiful — encroaching fundamentalism and intolerance, the institutionalization of everything from healthcare to faith to ideas, the ongoing struggle between church and state. But the story is the thing in The Burning Time. The unstoppable course of events that makes this sophisticated book a genuine page-turner also makes it indelible, and the puzzling out of connections between our times and the Burning Time is an activity that is sure to follow this most entertaining and edifying read.

Host With the Most

2006-04-12T08:39:00.001-04:00

Excerpted from “A First Communion dream in doubt,” by Kathleen Burge, The Boston Globe, April 12, 2006 (www.boston.com)

[A]s Victoria Coyne, 7, prepares for her first Holy Communion, there has been a major snag: As a child suffering from both celiac disease and diabetes, she can neither eat the wheat wafer that represents the body of Christ nor drink the wine that signifies his blood.

. . . Her parents thought they found a solution in a rice Communion wafer -- free of gluten, a protein found in wheat and other grains that makes her ill -- but official church policy forbids its use. The ritual of Communion is tied to the Last Supper, when Jesus is believed to have eaten wheat bread and drunk grape wine with his disciples. Canon law requires that both wheat and grapes be part of the Communion service.

. . . Officials in the Boston Archdiocese say they have seen more than 40 cases in the past year and a half in which people with celiac disease and other illnesses cannot eat the traditional Communion wafers. Each case was resolved, usually with low-gluten wafers. . . .

Victoria’s multiple health issues complicate her case. Her body cannot tolerate even the low-gluten wafers, her mother said.

. . . In 2001, the Boston Archdiocese told the family of a 5-year-old girl with celiac disease that when she took her First Communion, she could not substitute rice wafers for traditional communion wafers. Her family left the church and began practicing as Methodists.

In New Jersey, a bishop declared invalid the First Communion of a girl with celiac disease who took rice wafers instead of those containing gluten. Her mother unsuccessfully petitioned the Vatican to reverse the decision.

Excerpted from “Teddy,” in Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger

“I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that,” Teddy said. “It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”

Hendra's Messiah

2006-04-04T22:30:00.000-04:00

Tony Hendra’s acclaimed memoir, Father Joe, includes an account of a conversation in which Hendra and Joseph Warrilow, his Benedictine friend and mentor, discuss the topic of change. Hendra is lamenting some of the liturgical and musical changes that have, in his opinion, diluted the experience of monastic prayer. Joe tells him, “We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes.”

Asked for clarification, Joe explains that the world worships newness in things—like new cars and houses, which “begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.”

Change that fails to generate newness is pointless, Joe goes on. But still, “every so often” it is necessary “to clear away bad habits, deadwood, and outdated customs, to adapt to new information. That was necessary to return the Church to its essentials.”

Hendra’s new novel, The Messiah of Morris Avenue, indicates that Hendra took Father Joe’s observation to heart. This novel is both darkly comic in its satire of the state of contemporary Christianity, and highly spiritual in its vision of the necessary corrective. Hendra has imagined a world very much like our own; in fact, it is our own, but ten or so years from now. It is an American future in which today’s budding theocracy has fully bloomed. Fundamentalist Christians run the country, host the Academy Awards, and plan Armageddon. It is clearly a time to challenge bad habits and outdated customs, to effect change that generates newness. So into this world comes Jesus, in the person of José Francisco Lorcan Kennedy of Morris Avenue in the Bronx.

José’s skeptical scribe is the aptly named Johnny Greco, an old-school journalist forced to ply his trade in a world that has about as much enthusiasm for old-school journalism as Bill O’Reilly of Fox News has for MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. One of Johnny’s beats, and the top-rated department of the Web-based “newspaper” for which he writes, is the “Nut Log, which brought our reportorial scrutiny to bear upon rampant cases of mental derangement,” including that of religious nuts and self-identified messiahs. It is in the context of a Nut Log sighting that Johnny first becomes aware of José Kennedy. José appears to be more than your average Nut Log and warrants further investigation by the reporter. What he learns will change his own, and many other, lives.

Thirty-year-old José, it seems, smacks of authenticity. He strives to stay out of the spotlight. He doesn’t appear to be asking for money. His words ring true. And he performs miracles that appear to be the real thing and not cheap carnival tricks. Johnny is drawn in and seeks to find the truth about the young man.

In counterpoint to José we meet the Reverend James Zebediah Sabbath, top dog of America’s fundamentalist Christians, advisor to presidents and actual shot-caller for foreign and domestic policy-making.

The Reverend had been Spiritual Adviser to three presidents, enjoyed the rank of
two-star general as chaplain-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, and had twice
been reappointed Spiritual Clerk of what he first dubbed the Supreme Court Under
God. He was arguably one of the most powerful men in the nation—certainly the
CEO of fundamentalist Christianity, which by the second decade of Christ’s
Millennium was the only kind left standing.

While Sabbath cavorts with the principalities and powers, José drives a beat-up van and hangs with the Apostle Posse of misfits, ex-crack whores, former GIs, and his mother, Maria, of Morris Avenue in the Bronx. He offers enigmatic teachings that seem to parallel those of Jesus—but he makes it clear, in an interview with Johnny Greco, that there is more than parallelism going on:

“Christianity is unrecognizable to me. Christians have removed me from my own
religion. They teach that my teachings don’t apply until I return in glory and kill all their enemies. Oh, and reign for thousand years. I always forget that part. I did so much reigning last time. King of this, king of that.”

“Yeah, I remember. They put that sign on your cross.”

“Until then, they’re free to ignore my only commandment: Love one another, even your enemy. Free to take revenge on whom they please; wage wars; steal from the poor and blame them for their own poverty; allow disease, misery, famine, and
environmental devastation, even nuclear war, to sweep the planet, because—bring
it on! All these man-made horrors are signs sent by me that I’m just around the
corner? That’s not Christianity, that’s insanity.

“What I promised was that I would return exactly the same as the first time. An
obscure event in an obscure place, an ordinary Joe you wouldn’t look at twice.
Which would change the course of history.”

These two forces, José and Sabbath, will of course clash, and as the novel plays out we will learn whether the first shall be last and the last shall be first. And though Hendra is writing a parallel to a well-known story, it is remarkable how much he brings to it that is unexpected and leaves the reader gasping in delight and surprise, sometimes undone by the emotional impact.

With any luck, this much of a summary is enough to entice you to read the novel. The Messiah of Morris Avenue is an important novel precisely because Tony Hendra does what old Father Joe said needs to be done: he uncovers an authentic newness that strips Christianity down to its essence—that is, the heart of what Jesus did and taught. This is an important novel because Hendra’s rendering of this essence is remarkably refreshing and alive, so much so that its very presence in the pages of the novel highlights its absence in the faces of televangelists, theocratic pundits, and the red-hatted denizens of Vatican City. It is an important novel because it shows a living Jesus to those who have given up on Jesus because the religion that grew from his teachings has become debilitated, destructive, and abysmal.

Not long after Christmas I was talking with some family members and remarked that I’d love to write a novel in which Jesus returns to Earth as a man in contemporary America. I’m happy to say that Tony Hendra has saved me a lot of work. And in doing so he has done his part to help take Jesus back from the Christians.

Listening: Archbishop of Canterbury urges greenhouse gas emissions cuts

2006-03-30T16:30:00.000-05:00

[Episcopal News Service, Source: Lambeth Palace]

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, speaking with environment correspondent Roger Harrabin of BBC Radio 4's Today program, said the public has a moral responsibility to change lifestyles.

The consequences if they do not, Williams warned, would be the deaths of billions of people worldwide from the effects of extreme climate change.

He said the Bible made it clear that God would not forgive people who had been warned they were doing wrong. And he said US President George W Bush's stance of refusing to cut emissions because it might compromise American jobs was not compatible with a Christian point of view.

The full text of the interview follows:

ABC: Well I think it's an enormous problem; it's a huge practical problem, it's a huge moral problem, and the International Energy Agency calculated a couple of years ago that the next quarter of a century would see an increase of over 60% in carbon emissions worldwide with the expansion of the Indian and Chinese economies and unless we are able to effect serious concrete reductions immediately, the problem really is vast.

RH: You say it is a moral question. Now, there was a report last week by the Government's Development Department, DfID -- which we in the BBC obtained through freedom of information -- which says, in effect, our lifestyles are killing the poor through droughts and floods, and through, in the future, sea level rise. I mean that is a very serious moral question.

ABC: Quite clearly I think that if we see the kind the kind of water level rises being talked about in the next couple of decades then any possible agricultural development in, say, the Indian sub-continent is completely undermined by that, so yes, there is a moral question here, it's a question if you define morality as something which looks beyond just the interests of yourself and your immediate neighbors, then it's, I think, a profoundly immoral policy and lifestyle that doesn't consider those people who don't happen to share the present moment with us.

RH: Well, whose responsibility is it? Because when you talk to international leaders they will say, 'well the problem has got to be solved globally'. There is not point us cutting our emissions, if say the Chinese and the Indians don't cut their emissions. Where exactly does the moral responsibility lie?

ABC: I think in the first instance the moral responsibility lies with absolutely everybody, not only in terms of examining our own lifestyle and asking what, concretely can be done, but also in sending a message to governments that this is recognized as a priority by the public.

RH: Well I am not sure that the government yet does feel that. I mean, a lot of the delay about the climate change strategy is been because the Government didn't want to take on vested interest in society. So clearly, they don't feel the populous is yet ready for the sort of measures that would be needed, if we were really to tackle climate change.

ABC: So there's a real priority about educating people as to this priority; and I think the urgency has to be conveyed to people -- it's not a marginal question, it's about everybody's justice, everybody's life in the future. I think as I say we have to recognize the fact that it's not an optional extra, it's not a marginal question, and that we are in several areas now going on a very serious collision course; I mean if we think simply about the question of fuel use, it's obviously the case that the shortage of fuel supplies for high-fuel economies in developed nations, heavy car using economies to put it bluntly, is going to be a factor in destabilizing the global political situation in the next decade or so. It's been pointed out by a number of economists, I think absolutely correctly, that high oil-producing areas are at the moment almost all in areas of major political instability.

RH: You are making a case self-interest for us to wean ourselves off oil. But I mean, there are many difficult choices in the meantime. If we look the Government's climate strategy review, this was supposed to be published last summer. It was supposed to show how the Government was going to hit its 20 percent target. Now, as far as I understand it, the measures in the strategy review, even at the very best case, won't add up to 20 percent. And the delay is been caused because the Department of Trade and Industry don't want to disadvantage British business, they say 'well why don't motorists do something' and the Department of Transport say 'well, we don't want to take on the motorists, why don't householders do something' and it goes around in circles -- there is a massive problem, there is a leadership issue I guess.

ABC: I suppose so and it certainly is to some extent about who takes, who's prepared to take executive responsibility, for example, looking at questions about the enforcement of speed limits, but as I said earlier, it's also a question fundamentally about each one of us and about the step changes we can each make and which each organization can make too. And I say that because it's something, which I know that the Church of England is having to look at quite seriously in just those terms. We can't talk about this in abstract as if we occupied a high moral ground; we have got to look at our practice too.

RH: Let me go back to what you previously mention there, about speed limits. The government has calculated it can save almost a million tons of carbon a year, if it strictly enforced the 70mph speed limit. Yet when that proposal was made, ministers instantly backed off because they could see the bad headlines that would head their way. Do you have a position on this in terms of what the Government's responsibility is, vis a vis the changes that will happen in other parts of the word that you mentioned earlier, the floods and the droughts.

ABC: I think this is something in the long run that Government simply has to brazen out. I mean nobody likes talking about in government, coercion, in this respect -- whether it's speed limits or anything else. Nobody, for that matter, likes talking about enforceable international protocols and yet unless there is a real change in attitude, we have to contemplate those very unwelcome possibilities if we want to the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions of people to die.

RH: You think it is that serious -- for billions of people to die? That's very strong…

ABC: Well I think that's what it comes to. I think that if we have a situation in which, let's say, the agricultural economy of the Indian sub-continent is gravely affected; if we have rising water levels in the Indian sub-continent, quite clearly we're looking at death from starvation and from flooding. If we look more generally at desertification as a global problem we can see that there are issues there which clearly have to do with sustainable development and agriculture -- the delivery of the Millennium Development Goals, which are so important to this government and so many governments, becomes unthinkable and so we're looking at rising spirals of hunger and deprivation.

RH: When you look at the international situation things are very, very difficult to achieve on an international level because the Americans simply will not agree to any cuts whatsoever. President Bush is a Christian; are his actions compatible with Christian ethics?

ABC: I don't think it's compatible with a Christian ethic to ignore the environmental degradation that we face; it is a long term moral -- well not a long term, a medium term -- moral question for everyone and therefore a present imperative. It's perfectly true that nearly a quarter of carbon emissions on the face of the globe are attributable to the usage of the United States, and the leadership of the United States has been very slow to catch up with this; however I think it is quite significant that in the last -- twelve to eighteen months -- quite a number of Christian bodies, conservative Christian bodies in the US have begun to talk about climate change and about environmental issues, and have begun lobbying on Capitol Hill. President Bush is, it seems, listening to the voices that are beginning to push in a different direction here. I look forward with interest to developments on that because clearly there's been a real sea change in attitudes among some Christian quarters here.

RH: Let's project forward and assume that, given the current rate of change, we don't change fast enough to prevent climate change. How will God judge those leaders who did not move quickly enough to prevent the deaths of millions -- perhaps even billions of deaths that you forecast?

ABC: I think if we look at the language of the Bible on this, we very often come across a situation where people are judged for not responding to warnings. It's very deeply built in; there are choices we can make, each one of us, to change things now and I think what the Bible and the Christian tradition suggests is that those who have that challenge put before them, but not only the challenge, but the evidence for it, and don't respond, bear a very heavy responsibility before God.

© Rowan Williams 2006
Source: Episcopal News Service:
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/ens

Bill Moyers: A Time for Heresy

2006-03-27T13:08:00.000-05:00

This piece by Bill Moyers about the abuse of religion is too good not to pass on. It's from TomPaine.com.

". . . For a quarter of a century now a ferocious campaign has been conducted to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual, cultural, and religious frameworks that sustained America's social contract. The corporate, political, and religious right converged in a movement that for a long time only they understood because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries."

Read the entire piece at:

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/22/a_time_for_heresy.php

Urban Lives

2006-03-25T10:36:00.000-05:00

The Contract With God

I picked up a copy recently of Will Eisner’s The Contract With God Trilogy (W.W. Norton and Company), Eisner’s epic graphic novel begun in 1978, completed in 1995, and published in a single volume in early 2006, having been prepared for publication just before Eisner’s death in 2005. I read it in the course of a long afternoon in February. The trilogy is a visually stunning work that chronicles the life on Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx from the time before it was Dropsie, when it was pastoral farmland, through periods of depression, ethnic strife, war, and urban blight. The Contract With God is occasionally amusing, often moving, but it is mostly relentlessly stark and dramatic, in the vein of Steinbeck’s depression-era writings, Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy, and the naturalism of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.

Throughout Contract, the demographic of Dropsie Avenue changes with the times, with each new wave of immigrants causing a new wave of xenophobia and a new wave of flight from the neighborhood. One generation’s undesirables inevitably “rise” to the status of a sort of hegemonic entity under siege by the new wave, and on and on. The constants through all of this are several:

--Young people fall in love with others outside their “group”
--“Outsider” children who strive for education and advancement are derailed by the dominant group
--Property owners are at odds with renters
--Property value drives actions
--The bad guys worm their way into the operations of even the most honest businessperson by way of intimidation and violence
--Dissenters are persona non grata
--Churches, synagogues, and secular institutions that try to challenge the status quo are largely ineffective
--Moments of redemption are few and far between, and they are never complete; as good people achieve power, power tends to corrupt even the highest ideals

As bleak as all that may sound, The Contract With God is remarkably and satisfyingly readable. I realize that I have a penchant for hard-edged fiction that features the “darker” side of American life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the underside, if you will, of the economic growth and technological innovation. The Contract With God offers all of that and more: the great work of one of our graphic geniuses who puts his people, his neighborhood, his nation, in our hands between the hard covers of this marvelous book.

Crash

I don’t know whether Crash deserved to win best picture at the Academy Awards, and don’t really care. The script may have relied too heavily on coincidence and happenstance, and may have thus been emotionally manipulative. I’m not saying it relied on cheap tricks to suck us in, but it certainly played some narrative games to keep our attention.

The quality of the ensemble’s performance, however, along with deft direction and editing, kept me on the edge of my seat throughout much of the latter half of the movie. I had been set up well and was willing to suspend disbelief to a sufficient degree to remain involved. I think that what really grabs in the movie, though, is that underlying each of the several nasty and seemingly hopeless situations is the hope of some sort of redemptive moment. The movie demonstrates the possibility that there are various ways out of any given situation, no matter how harsh or negative it is, and that we can be active players in determining which is the road not taken and which is the road we walk.

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party

Contrast with all of this with the low-budget concert film Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. Chappelle, though he may not appeal to the “universal taste” (neither did Lenny Bruce), is a comic genius. His tribulations of the past year or so, in which he quit his brilliant, successful, and lucrative show on Comedy Central, led to a great deal of ink in the press and sound bites on TV, not all of it complimentary. But as he demonstrated during a recent two-hour interview with James Lipton on The Actor’s Studio, he’s back, and he’s solid, grounded, and together. And his block party shows him using his abilities as an entertainer to break down those metaphorical walls that divide the many sectors of society.

The premise is that Chappelle is throwing a block party in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant on a Sunday afternoon and evening in September of 2004. Word is spread through the streets but eventually winds up on the internet, leading to crowds coming from far and wide. Chappelle himself brings busloads of partiers from southwestern Ohio, where he grew up (splitting time between there and Washington DC) and now lives. The Ohio contingent consists of a number of white people and the all-black marching band of a state college.

Most of the film focuses on the concert itself, along with backstage and rehearsal footage. And though it’s Dave’s block party, he spends very little time at center stage. His lineup, which includes Kanye West, Mos Def, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, and the Fugees, plays to a huge crowd at the corner of Quincy and Downing Streets in Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood that has seen better days, one that recalls Eisner’s Dropsie Avenue during a period of blight. But the performers put all of that well into the background. I don’t know much about hip-hop and rap, but it was clear to me that I was seeing and hearing contemporary peers to past greats whose music trod the line between art and social action. The performances are passionate and compelling and show hip-hop culture as a force for change.

Lauryn Hill’s cover of “Killing Me Softly” provided an especially poignant moment for me. “Killing Me Softly” was big hit for Roberta Flack back in the 1970s, but was written by singer Lori Lieberman in response to a Don McLean concert in 1973. McLean, of “American Pie” fame (the song, not the movie) is a singer-songwriter who came up under the tutelage of Pete Seeger, when singers strummed and hootenannied and belted out lyrics against the Vietnam War and for environmental protection and social justice. Hearing the song at Chappelle’s party leads one to believe that, thankfully, this is one circle that has remained unbroken.

When Chappelle bids the audience good night with (I’m quoting from memory here) “God bless you, now go do some good,” it’s easy to leave the theater with light step and a feeling that yes, change is possible, that the positive can overtake the negative—and that that kind of change has to start right here.