Avdat

You Tube Friday: non-crappy Christmas carol version

Yes Virginia, there are crappy Christmas carols out there, but I Saw Three Ships is not one of them. In fact, the song is indestructible. You cannot murder it.

See what I mean?

Hermeneutical coincidences

Strange coincidence: Yesterday I turned in a paper on patristic hermeneutics, specifically on the role of history in the interpretive strategies of Origen and Antiochene exegetes. The same day Thomas J. Bridges posted some thoughts on the same topic at An und fuer sich. So this has emboldened me to post my paper here now, which is probably unwise since it hasn't been graded and returned to me yet!

More coincidences. Tomorrow the Theology Discussion Group is going to discuss a few songs, including Crash Test Dummies' God Shuffled His Feet, which I guess is the perfect Antiochene retort to the allegorists: people want answers and all you give them are pretty little stories!

Crappy Christmas carols

Mark Kleiman hatin' on Frosty the Snowman before Thanksgiving is here. Eager to avoid the wrath of Bill O'Reilly, he is careful to point out that his problem is with secularized Christmas music, not, say, Adeste Fideles. Kevin Drum, who as far as I know is not a believer, agrees, and proposes that O'Reilly and Kleiman ally themselves in a War on Bad Christmas Music.

I'm glad that there are some secularists out there who appreciate Christian artistry, if not Christian doctrine.

The comments, naturally, devolve into an argument about which Holiday Carol is the crappiest. A couple point out that Frosty the Snowman and I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus are really kinda creepy and sinister, if you think about them, which reminds me to link to this post by Camassia about pop songs you loved in middle school which, in retrospect, make you want to go Eww.

But if you really want your soul sucked out of you, you should wait tables at Ruby Tuesday during the Holiday Season. The soundtrack satisfies one's spiritual and aesthetic palate as well as flat Diet Coke. The absolute dregs was Christmas Is Going to the Dogs, by eels. You can listen to it here! Since the song blatantly violated management's mandatory perkiness, a co-worker was convinced a surly employee in the home office slipped it in as a subliminal critique of where the company was going. 

I don't miss waiting tables, but I do miss my co-workers, who cope with daily humiliation by cultivating the best sense of humor of any group of people I've ever met. So a dreadful song like Christmas Is Going to the Dogs is able to evoke feelings of nostalgia that I'll Be Home for Christmas could never. Ironic, eh?

You Tube Friday

For some reason I woke up with this song in my head. I blame Lee, who posted another great 70s paean to "base injustice done to my Love" last Friday. And while I hate to go all fanboy homer on you, I do have to say that Steve Perry's vocal range is, like, dizzying, and that everything they put out after 1980 was crap. Including Escape.

Middle Age

So I turned 40 on Sunday. And last night I went to the U2 concert in Charlottesville. And there were no, I mean ZERO, young adults in the crowd. My brother-in-law quipped, "The only young people at this concert are here with their Mommies and their Daddies." It did look like a Mothers Morning Out event at Starbucks writ large.

Something else: I'm training for the Richmond marathon. And I had a nurse come over to the house to examine me for a life insurance policy. And if her measurements can be believed, I have lost eight pounds, but gained an inch in my waist size.

How is that possible? Is that what middle age does to you? Does everything sort of, you know, sag down and forward, and no fitness regime can stop it?

The concert, by the way, was mind-boggling. Bono's, "Is Thomas Jefferson in the house?" was clever and warmly received. Muse, the opening act, performed well. I hear that they have a great following in Europe, and their style was well-suited to warm up the crowd for U2.

If they come to a stadium near you, I urge you to get on that walker of yours and hobble out to see them.

A Tarantino free post about violence and hateful, spiteful onlookers

I want to briefly re-visit the horrible quadruple murder in Farmville, VA, and specifically this Richmond Times-Dispatch article about the victims to which I linked below. I'm sure more of the truth will come out later--truth which may undermine the following--but from what the article says, one can easily imagine the following scenario:

 A teenage girl decides to rebel against her minister father and her criminologist mother by dabbling in the horrorcore scene. What stronger statement could a teen make? Grinding music about cannibalism and murder is about as far away from Christianity and a commitment to prevent violence against women as you can get. Criminologist's mother makes a judgment call--rather than forbid any further exposure to these people or their music, which may inspire a backlash (running away, delinquent behavior) she will try to demystify this scene by chaperoning her daughter's trip to a horrorcore festival. But things went terribly wrong.

Now that may not be the way things went down. And that may or may not be the way you'd handle the situation. But whether it went down that way or not, and whether that scenario is at all understandable, there's no excuse for this reading of the situation buried in the comment thread:

I hate to blame the victim here, but, come on, taking your child to a concert featuring bands named “Stitch Mouth”,  “Dismembered Fetus”, and “BodyBagz”?  That is clearly irresponsible parenting if not child endangerment. How do you just expect a child to ‘grow out of it’ if you don’t steer them in the right direction? It sounds like the mother was probably a liberal (she was a college professor), and had that mentality that evil doesn’t exist and that she didn’t want to ‘interfere’ with her child… give me a break!

"I hate to blame the victim here," but truth be told I can't wait to get in my licks! This commenter knows a lot about the situation. (S)he knows how the victim votes; (s)he knows the victim is a laissez-faire parent, and (s)he knows that the victim was far too sentimental about human nature for her own good. Wow, that's a lot more than I know.

And this is par for the course for any newspaper's web site. Blogs are notorious for flame wars and trolls, but blogs are an episode of Barney compared to the general American public opining on hapless schmucks who wind up featured in their hometown daily.

I swear, there's a ton of people out there who enjoy the newspaper with their coffee because they could no more face the day without feeling smug than they could without caffeine. They don't read the newspaper to learn anything. They read it because they can. Reading the paper and not showing up in it is proof positive you aren't one of the stupids who's getting what's coming to you.

I'd love to live in a world like that. If the world were really like that, I'd drop my aspirations to work in higher education in a heartbeat. I'd buy a Sarah Palin 2012 pinup calendar. I'd lock my home-schooled kids in a basement, pop in a Jonas Brothers CD, hit "repeat all" and tell them to do their math while I cleaned my guns. And I'd sleep like a baby.

But we don't live in a world where everybody gets what's coming to them.

What I read on my vacation: The Shack

Technically my vacation isn't over. I'm lollygagging at the 2008 Comfort Inn location of the year in lovely Sturbridge, Massachusetts. (And it is lovely! New England's rolling, nearly mountain-sized hills covered in birch trees and balsam firs are lovely. At least they are in the summer.) Anyway, I can't watch TV because I want the kids to go to sleep, so why not blog a little bit before hitting the road tomorrow?

OK, what I read. The Shack. It was on the living room table with the other detritus that made it in from my family's convergence on The McKinley House in Bass Harbor, Maine. I'd heard of the book but literally knew nothing about it, other than that it was of a religious nature. My mother-in-law brought it with her, but she didn't like it. So I decided to read it.

Quickly into the novel I realized I had ventured into the dread regions of inspirational fiction, where plot, character development, credible dialogue and a nice turn of phrase are all sacrificed on the altar of doctrinal truth and point-scoring. But I pressed ahead because I knew that you, my legions of adoring readers, were starving for new material from me, and I had to provide it for you in the form of this book review!

Until I got to the middle of the book when the protagonist, a bereaved father, chills out with the Triune God for a weekend in a log cabin in the woods. I just had to set it aside then, not because I object to the book's iconography of the Holy Trinity as Queen Latifah, Lucy Liu and a swarthy, middle-eastern carpenter. I mean, I'm a mainline Christian. I read Beyond God the Father as an undergraduate! Back in the day, everybody I knew was calling the Almighty "she." I had to set it aside because the book was so late 1980s, you know?

But that's what the conservative Evangelicals do. They ridicule "liberal" Christians for both capitulating to culture and for being irrelevant to the culture (a contradictory argument if there ever was one). And then they pick through the best mainline scholarship of the previous generation and regurgitate it. So Open Theism is conservative evangelicalism stoned on process theology, and I'm guessing The Shack is a little Moltmann, a little feminist theology, and assorted theodicies ground up into a sausage of awful prose. I swear, if liberal Protestantism didn't exist, evangelicals would have to invent it.

I'm saying I'm guessing because I didn't finish the book. I read the plot summary on Wikipedia. Is that unfair? Augustine put off converting to Christianity for a long time because he was such a literary snob that the idea that the New Testament was divine revelation scandalized him. Am I a snob?

Well, not enough of a snob to not be a Christian. But like P.D. James, I detest it when cynics mock excellence as elitism. Here's the thing: after Dostoyevsky penned Ivan Karamozov's devastating takedown of all attempts to justify God's power and love in the face of natural and man-made cruelty, the only solution to the "problem of evil" is his brother Alyosha's rejoinder, also penned by Dostoyevsky: he kisses his brother on the cheek. There is no good explanation for why evil exists if God is sovereign and good. There are only acts of love grounded in resurrection hope. By the time I was a third of the way through The Shack I had a pretty good feeling that the author wouldn't be able to demonstrate that in an artful manner.

So, onto a better written book, whose myriad of (theological?) anthropologies, while not Christian, were far more entertaining and thought-provoking. Yes, I'm talking about Watchmen. In the meantime, I googled I Hate The Shack, and the White Zombie song Shack of Hate was the third hit. That inspired me to create a White Zombie channel on Pandora. So all is not lost!

Me and Michael Jackson

My junior high school bus was full of Beavis and Buttheads. This meant I couldn't express any affection for Michael Jackson's Beat It because on my bus, liking a song with a title like that was tatamount to coppin' to masturbation. I thought that this was terribly unfair and stupid; the guitar licks Eddie Van Halen laid down on that single were better than anything any hair band favored on my school bus was recording in the early 80s, but I was one of those wimpy kids and wasn't going to die on the hill of my proud, unapologetic love for Michael Jackson. But now I'm almost 40, and I don't care what anybody thinks I'm coppin' to. Billie Jean was better, but Beat It was a great rock 'n' roll single.

Still, this was back when MJ had Jheri curls, a broad nose and a black face. This was before the chimp, Neverland, dangling the baby off the balcony, and two brushes with pedophilia accusations. Those kids allegedly abused by Michael Jackson were the same age we were when Thriller came out. They may have been Beavis and Buttheads on my bus, or maybe it was the young adolescent collective unconscious sounding a faint warning alarm.

Today we learned that even in death, Mchael Jackson is still being pimped by his daddy. And I hear that Janet's already looted his mansion. Now, people behave badly when people die. They fight over the service, over the will, over family heirlooms. They blame physicians, law enforcement officers and demand answers to essentially unanswerable questions. But when it's Michael Jackson's family, small-time white trash behavior becomes a meda circus.

For the past few days I've hummed Billie Jean in my mind, but now musical nostalgia must needs give way to rubbernecking a celebrity car pileup. I need to fish or cut bait. Wall myself off from Michael Jackson news or follow every twist and turn with morbid fascination. I had an aunt who gave up all her soap operas in 1995 just to watch the OJ trial. Maybe it's time for me to make a similar commitment. Or not.

Inauguration Day cont.

How can Wolf Blitzer be so narcissistic as to think that people would rather listen to him than Itzhak Perlman? When he started talking over the quartet I switched from CNN to C-SPAN and Never Looked Back, Baby!

You Tube Sunday

Because my birthday's in September, which makes it the greatest month ever: