Author: D. G. Hart

After The Wire They Broke the Mold . . .

Published on by D. G. Hart189 Comments

The missus and I finally polished off Walter White, the high school chemistry teacher turned meth cooker and dealer, the principal character of Breaking Bad. As I have indicated several times, Breaking Bad always left me (and the wife) feeling manipulated. Walt never seemed like a real character with genuine demons. He came across, instead, as a vehicle for writers to fashion for the purpose of extending a story line. Schuyler, his wife, also never seemed credible in her transformation from vapid housewife to gangster spouse. But then, the operation that Walt worked with either to cook, distribute, or make money never seemed credible, as if he could stand up to existing drug cartels and assorted kingpins and live to tell about it. The only likable characters were Saul, the lawyer, who is more cartoonish than real, Mike, the hitman who clearly would have cleaned Walt’s clock any number of times had it not been for the writer’s hi-jinks, and Hank, who seemed competent until he learned that Walt was the object of his long search and turned into a brooding bowl of jello for several episodes.

I am glad the series is over. We stayed with it only to see what the writers would try next.

But to compare this to the Sopranos (which I haven’t seen much) or The Wire defies belief. First, the characters in both of those shows seem plausible and are likable, even with their faults and wickedness. Second, the writers seemed to know something about organized crime and that you don’t simply decide one day to open up a drug operation and keep your life without gangstering up with a lot of protection. Third, in The Wire, as I’ve said, you like almost every character even if they are against each other — from Jimmy to Stringer Bell, from Prop Joe to Avon Barksdale, from Bubbles to Omar. And as the wife said, never has a show had so many African-American characters that you were sad to see go when the series ended (or when they died).

Of late, some commentators have wondered about the problem of binge viewing — the practice of watching numerous episodes over the course of one evening rather than seeing them in real time when they originally air. This may be a problem in the television series genre but I have no idea how anyone will remedy it. What concerns me is the knowledge that viewers have about the number of episodes left in a given season or show. In Homeland’s second season, for instance, several significant plot twists occur in the first two episodes in a way that leaves you wondering how the writers will get through all twelve episodes. The same happened at the beginning of the second part of Breaking Bad’s last season — though the habit of showing the result of a plot line, say Walt arranging his bacon into a 52 and then backing up to show how Walt got there felt contrived (as did too much of the show — have I already said that?). At least in a movie, even if you know how long it is supposed to be, you have a sense that before you is a complete unit that will resolve itself and let you walk away. With a television series, you have too much time to wonder what the writers are scheming and whether they are doing so simply to secure a contract for another season.

Unless, of course, you’re watching The Wire, in which case, you’re only left hoping that David Simon might consider another visit to Baltimore to update the doings of Gus, Bunk, Bubbles, and Marlowe.

More Ambivalence, Less Schizophrenia

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A couple of stories caught my eye last week about evangelicals and the academy. On the one hand, evangelicals rock:

The media often portrays scientists and Christians as incapable of peaceful coexistence. But results from a recent survey suggest the two are not as incompatible as one might think. In fact, 2 million out of nearly 12 million scientists are evangelical Christians. If you were to bring all the evangelical scientists together, they could populate the city of Houston, Texas.

Sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund and her colleagues at Rice University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reported results from the largest study of American views on science and religion at the association’s annual conference in Chicago on Sunday, February 16. More than 10,000 people, including 574 self-identified as scientists, responded to the 75-question survey. Among the scientists, 17 percent said the term “evangelical” describes them “somewhat” or “very well,” compared to 23 percent of all respondents.

On the other hand, evangelicals fear rocks:

For years, Christians have complained that academia has been an unwelcoming place for them. They’re probably right. While the evidence about whether colleges and universities are encouraging Christians to lose their faith is mixed, the anti-Christian humanist bias within academia is relatively clear—both to the disproportionately low number of Christians within the academy and to researchers, like me, who’ve taken the time to study them.

Given the hostility towards Christians, we’re left asking how Christians should approach higher education. Do they belong in academia at all?

Evangelicals follow the lead of Americans who generally sense that they are either in the mainstream or part of the aggrieved, excluded from a place at the table. The former could do their neighbors an immeasurable favor if they learned (and taught others) to live without a desire for acceptance or dominance but simply conceded that no group is in control, or conversely, that every group feels beleaguered. And if James Madison was right, that the key to a constitutional republic was the more factions the better, then the less Americans or evangelicals identify either as a dominant majority or a persecuted minority, the more likely they might be to accept that all positions are contested, that few agreements are possible, and that we walk on egg shells out there in public.

Of course, it’s more comfortable (as some less formal folks count comfort) to walk around in your underwear, as if you owned the joint. But if everyone lived like they were renters and had to worry about music being too loud or unwelcome cooking odors, the United States might be as hospitable a place as is possible this side of the ultimate Downton Abbey in the sky.

Being Inflamed Is So Yesterday

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From a review of Addie Zierman’s When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over:

. . . the title of Addie Zierman’s memoir is evocative: When We Were on Fire. A good title will tell you a lot about a book, and indeed there is a lot to learn from this one. We know, for example, that the titular “we” are no longer “on fire,” that it happened in the past. We know this is about more than just one person, although whether the “we” is a constant voice or a changing one remains to be seen.

Most telling is that last bit, “on fire,” a resonant phrase for anyone even passingly familiar with the evangelical subculture of the 1990s. “Fire” was the favored metaphor for a deep and burning passion for God. Consuming. Refining. To be “on fire for God” was the highest compliment, the deepest mystery, the truest sign that you were wholly his.

At Least They Can't Blame the United States

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Tracey Rowland, one of the Augustinian Thomists, who is no fan of Whig Thomists, the ones who like the United States and argue for Roman Catholicism’s compatibility with it, wonders what’s going on in Belgium, the Roman Catholic country that just passed a child euthanasia bill:

I first visited Belgium in 2004 to attend a theology conference in Leuven. The conference Mass was the most bizarre liturgical experience of my life. It did not take place in any of the many churches in Leuven but in the conference room itself. Part of the ritual took the form of watching a video of the September 11 attack on the twin towers while listening to mood music. One of the participants from Holland was dressed in a folk costume and looked like a member of the band The Village People. There was also a Nigerian priest who was treated like an idiot because he expressed respect for Cardinal Arinze. I took some flak for being critical of the culture of modernity and one polite person apologized to me by saying, “you see, around here people think of you as an ally of Joseph Ratzinger”!

My overall impression was that Leuven was like a town that had been hit by a neutron bomb—the kind of bomb that kills people but leaves buildings intact. All the Gothic buildings remained—the outward symbols of a once vibrant Catholic culture were still on view as tourist attractions—but the people who worked within the buildings seemed not to be the original inhabitants, but another people who had moved in after some terrible cataclysm and were ill at ease with what had gone before. Our Lady, the Seat of Wisdom, and Patroness of Leuven, appeared marginalized.

A few years later I attended another theology conference, this time in Krakow. A Belgian professor delivered the keynote address in the hall of the Polish Academy of the Arts and Sciences. He veered off topic and gave a rousing oration in favor of the projects of the culture of death (eugenics, euthanasia, a tax on babies etc). He even argued that anyone who opposed contraception should be convicted of a criminal offense. Not all the conference participants were supporters of Humanae Vitae, but they were completely shocked that such an anti-life and totalitarian speech could be given in the hall of the Polish Academy just a couple of hours drive from Auschwitz. What stunned the participants was the closeness of the ideology of the speaker to that of the Nazi ideologues whose specters (metaphorically speaking) still haunt the streets of Krakow. A quick Google search revealed that the illustrious academic had been Jesuit educated in Antwerp and was a product of the University of Leuven. A more recent Google search revealed that last year he ended his life by being given a lethal injection in the presence of his children. He at least had the virtue of practicing what he preached, but I wondered how someone who was Jesuit educated in the 1930s could end up in such a spiritual state. In an interview given not long before his death he said that religion is nonsense, a childish explanation for things that science has yet to fathom. At some moment in his life he had bought the Feuerbachian critique.

Audacious, indeed.

Be Not Conformed to this World

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Which would be an argument for lighting up, at least judging by this review:

Oh, what fun smokers won’t be having in 2014. As of New Year’s Day, Boston joined six other large cities banning smoking in its 251 city parks. The fine for violation is $250 and includes anyone caught “vaping” a smokeless electronic cigarette. In Oregon, there is now a $500 fine for smoking in a private automobile with a person 18 years old or younger on board; and in Illinois, flicking a cigarette butt out a car window—what was called “dinching” in the Bogie and Bacall era—could result in a $1,500 fine. The CVS pharmaceutical chain has announced that it will stop selling cigarettes this year.

On the bright side, however, you can smoke dope to your heart’s content in Colorado. And yet, only a generation ago, cigarette smoking was considered normal behavior, while lighting a joint was regarded as the act of a deviant.

Consistency and coherence are overrated. We need more hybridity.

Finding the West's Inner Augustine

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Peter Lawler has responded to Patrick Deneen about the divide among U.S. Roman Catholics on whether or not to get right with America. Part of Lawler’s response is to invoke Augustine on the homelessness that all people feel this side of the eschaton (or is it merely the impermanence of creaturely existence?):

All political arrangements, devised as they are by sinners, have within them the seeds of their own destruction. It’s the City of God, not the City of Man, that’s sustainable over the infinitely long term. Still, Christians have the duty not to be too alienated from their country, and to do what they can to be of service to their fellow citizens by loyally encouraging what’s good and could be better in the political place where they live. America, we southerners know especially well, is the easiest place in the world to be both at home and homeless, to enjoy the good things of the world without forgetting that our true home is somewhere else.

When Lawler does this, he implicitly invokes the Augustinian- vs. Whig-Thomist debate previously mentioned here. Ironically, it is Lawler the Whig, who identifies more with Augustine than the Augustinian-Thomists who seem to be motivated more an older view of politics than an Augustinian one.

Through most of these debates I fail to detect a recognition of an even older division in political thought, namely one between pagan and Christian theories. Here is how R. A. Markus describes that difference in his book on Augustine:

For the polis-centered tradition of Greek thought the political framework of human life was the chief means of achieving human perfection. Life in a city-state was an education for virtue, a fully human life, the good life. Politics was a creative task. It consisted in bringing into being the kind of ordering of society which was most conducive to the realisation of ultimate human purposes. In this sense, Plato, Aristotle, the Sophists and the rest all upheld fundamentally the same conception of political activity. . . .

In Judaeo-Christian tradition the key-note of political thinking was different. The people of God, whether of the old or the new Covenants, could not think of themselves as citizens involved in creating the right order in society, nor of their leaders as entrusted with bringing such an order into being. Only God’s saving act could establish the one right social order. In relation to that kingdom they were subjects, not agents; in relation to all other human kingdoms, they were aliens rather than citizens. . . . Their whole tradition was dominated by the need to adjust themselves to a society radically alienated from the one ultimately acceptable form of social existence. In such a society they could never feel themselves fully at home. (Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine, 73-74)

Since Thomism is what seems to bind both sides of the Roman Catholic debate about the U.S., and since Thomas Aquinas was responsible for injecting a major dose of Aristotle into western Christianity, could it be that Thomism is responsible for the preoccupation of contemporary Roman Catholics about society and politics instead of ecclesiology and sacraments (what accounts for the transformers, neo-Calvinists, and theonomists is likely nostalgia for Christian nationalism — Dutch, Scottish, or U.S.). In fact, I wonder if anyone who is serious about Augustine and his views on the church as a pilgrim people can ever talk about “human flourishing” with a straight Christian face. If Markus is correct, human flourishing is what the pagans wanted through the polis. For Christians, human flourishing doesn’t happen this side of the new heavens and new earth.

I Wonder What He thinks of Earnestness

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From the fellow who thought the comparison of Scripture reading to oatmeal needed an injection of sanity:

I had never heard the phrase “God’s ordinary means of grace” until I was introduced to the reformed faith. As a result I had no doctrinal or experiential category for the true significance of those ordinary elements that make up the corporate life of a biblically informed church. If you are unfamiliar with the term “ordinary means of grace” it refers to those elements of our gathered worship to which the Lord has attached his blessing: the preaching and reading of God’s Word, the sacraments (Lord’s Supper and Baptism), prayer, praise, and fellowship.

These ordinary means of grace are the things that the Lord has given his church. They are not the inventions of man. We call them means of grace because the Lord has appointed them as means by which he blesses and builds his church. We call them ordinary because there is nothing about them that is spectacular. They are not rare like miracles. They are ordinary. They are to be practiced regularly in our Lord’s Day gatherings precisely because we regularly need what God offers us through them. But these are gifts not given to movements. God has given these means of grace to his church.

Sounds rather oatmealish manna-like to me.

The Limits of Kuyper's Appeal

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First, Jim Bratt raises questions about the triumphalism that traffics under the banner of all things Kuyper:

Kuyper himself favored military images. His newspapers were named The Standard and The Herald, and he often used metaphors of combat, titanic struggle, desperate battle. Of course, it was an age of heroic language, the era of muscular Christianity. Lead on Oh King Eternal (1887). Onward Christian Soldiers (1865). Dare to Be a Daniel (1873), which he quoted on the floor of Parliament! Two world wars and the whole bloody twentieth century have taught us to be wary of such language, though we must in fairness remember that Kuyper and his contemporaries lived prior to all that. The man was stunned and deeply shaken—not to mention financially bankrupted—by the outbreak of the first war, now exactly a hundred years ago.

The legacy of separate Christian institutions that grew out of Kuyper’s work in the Netherlands the Dutch labeled “pillarization”—each religio-ideological group inhabiting its own column of consociation, cradle-to-grave. At another place Kuyper imagined Dutch higher education as a collection of ideologically defined universities that were hermetically sealed off from each other, communicating not in person but only via a “post office.” But then again, he pictured the universe of knowledge as a tree, everyone sharing a common trunk and root system, but different schools of thought—including Christian—diverging ever farther apart from each other as branches the greater growth and maturity they attained.

Pillars. Armies. Islands. Branches. Not much hope of colloquy there. Not much of a truly engaged conversation with religio-ideological rivals, an ideal or expectation that we entertain—realistically?—today.

Then, Chris Lehmann questions whether contemporary appeals to Kuyper (like George Marsden’s latest) can withstand the errors of Francis Schaeffer (thanks to our Pennsylvania correspondent):

. . . Marsden doesn’t place Schaeffer at the demoralized rear-guard of a massive breakdown of intellectual discipline on the evangelical right. Indeed, one of Schaeffer’s unacknowledged oversights, Marsden suggests, was that he unwittingly shared in the very Enlightenment tradition that he was attempting to banish to the margins of the American spiritual consensus. “The strictly biblicist heritage fosters a rhetoric that sounds theocratic and culturally imperialist, and in which a Christian consensus would seem to allow little room for secularists or their rights,” Marsden writes. But these same figures remained in thrall to an Enlightenment legacy that privileges “the necessity of protecting freedoms, especially the personal and economic freedoms of the classically liberal tradition.” As a result, Marsden argues, when evangelical thinkers like Schaeffer talk “about returning to a ‘Christian’ America, they may sound as though they would return to the days of the early Puritans; yet, practically speaking, the ideal they are invoking is tempered by the American enlightenment and is reminiscent of the days of the informal Protestant establishment, when Christianity was respected, but most of the culture operated on more secular terms.”

Marsden is persuasive here—until he overreaches. It’s true that in annexing the American founding and most of its skeptical Enlightenment apostles to the broader sweep of a redeemed Christian history, Schaeffer and others like him at least paid lip service to the rationalist ideals of religious toleration—a tradition, moreover, that was deeply imprinted in the history of dissenting Protestant denominations such as Baptism. But there’s little suggestion, in the general brunt of the emerging religious right’s brief against the secular humanist enemy, that the ideals of toleration merit much more than lip service. . . .

The contradictory impulses on display in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment may well help explain why Marsden’s study finally alights on the author’s own plea for a sort of Protestant revival—by suggesting that American thinkers more closely examine, and appropriate to their own ends, the model of plural religious observance advanced by Abraham Kuyper. That’s right: Marsden is proposing that we move beyond the present impasse in the annals of evangelical controversy by returning to the Dutch theologian and statesman who inspired Cornelius Van Til to envision an evangelical order of pure and absolute presuppositionalist certainty.

The Callers' Dilemma

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On the one hand (from a traditionalist Roman Catholic perspective):

If John Paul II is truly a saint, the Catholic faithful must recognize that the Catholic Church and the Orthodox communities are sister churches, responsible together for safeguarding the one Church of God. . . . If John Paul II is truly a saint, the Catholic faithful must recognize the Anglicans as brothers and sisters in Christ and express this recognition by praying together. . . . If John Paul II is truly a saint, the Catholic faithful must hold that what divides Catholics and Protestants . . . is minimal in comparison to that which unites them. . . . The Catholic faithful must recognize the value of the religious witness of the Jewish people. . . . The Catholic faithful must recognize that after the final resurrection, God will be satisfied with the Moslems and they will be satisfied with Him. . . . Faithful Catholics must recognize that heads of state may not arrogate to themselves the right to prevent the public profession of a false religion.

On the other hand (from a culture wars perspective):

I think the article (quite contrary to its intent) makes a pretty good case for why John Paul II should be canonized: In the West’s MSM narrative, he was a reactionary because he opposed abortion, contraception, and women’s ordination — but the SSPX offers us a helpful reminder of how deep his commitment was to the agenda of Vatican II, to opening the Catholic Church in outreach to other Christians and members of other religions.

Don’t expect Jason and the Callers to weigh in — too many early church fathers to read.

(Thanks to an e-correspondent.)

More Anti-Lutheran Prejudice

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You know the republic is off the rails when we have holidays devoted to presidents rather than Speakers of the House. The way I read (and teach) the Constitution is that Congress has more power — way more — than the executive branch. Presidents used to be figure heads that we wheeled out for ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Then war happened — whether on rebels, poverty, drugs, or communism. There went the legislative branch as the most important in the national government.

But for anyone wanting to be a little devilish on this holiday, why not rival George Washington and Abraham Lincoln with the First Speaker of the House — wait for it — Frederic Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg (and all subsequent Speakers of the House):

MUHLENBERG, Frederick Augustus Conrad, (brother of John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, uncle of Francis Swaine Muhlenberg and of Henry Augustus Philip Muhlenberg, and great–great–grand uncle of Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg), a Delegate and a Representative from Pennsylvania; born in Trappe, Pa., January 1, 1750; pursued an academic course; attended the University of Halle, Germany; studied theology and was ordained by the ministerium of Pennsylvania a minister of the Lutheran Church October 25, 1770; preached in Stouchsburg and Lebanon, Pa., 1770-1774, and in New York City 1774-1776; when the British entered New York he felt obliged to leave, and returned to Trappe, Pa.; moved to New Hanover, Pa., and was pastor there and in Oley and New Goshenhoppen until August 1779; Member of the Continental Congress, 1779-1780; member of the Pennsylvania state house of representatives, 1780-1783, and its speaker, 1780-1783; delegate to and president of the Pennsylvania state constitutional convention in 1787 called to ratify the Federal Constitution; elected as a Pro-Administration candidate to the First Congress, reelected as an Anti-Administration candidate to the Second and Third Congresses, and elected as a Republican to the Fourth Congress (March 4, 1789-March 3, 1797); Speaker of the House of Representatives (First and Third Congresses); was not a candidate for renomination in 1796; president of the council of censors of Pennsylvania; receiver general of the Pennsylvania Land Office, 1800-1801; died in Lancaster, Pa., June 4, 1801; interment in Woodward Hill Cemetery.