Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 325
March 23, 2014
What Kind Of Catholic Is Richard Rodriguez?
In a remarkable review of Darling, Rodriguez’s recent “spiritual autobiography,” Paul J. Griffiths ponders the question:
He is, by the account of this book (a more detailed account of his raising and formation can be had from Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation) a regular Mass-goer; a lover of the Church; one who intends to stay in and with the Church until death; one who rarely goes to confession (he notes a thirty-two-year span when he did not go at all); one who loves the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (a gay-transvestite group that performs corporal works of mercy while also publicly mocking the Church), and Mother Teresa; and one who has deep and principled disagreements with some of the Church’s doctrinal positions on the nature and place of women, and on the acceptability of homosexual acts and the loves that accompany them. More important than all this, informing and subtending all this, is that he is the kind of Catholic who understands, represents, and tries to respond to the love of the Lord in a devastated world of pain.
Griffiths goes on to grapple with how Rodriguez approaches the fraught issue of homosexuality and the Church:
I don’t agree with every position taken in Darling, or with every argument offered. On Islam, I suspect that what’s needed at the moment isn’t emphasis on the similarities among the three so-called Abrahamic religions as desert faiths, real though these are, but rather on difference and complementarity. The recent work of Rémi Brague on this, especially On the God of the Christians (and on one or two others), is especially instructive. On homosexuality and homosexual acts, by contrast, I think Rodriguez much closer to being right than not. Insofar as such acts are motivated by and evoke love, they are good and to be loved; insofar as they do not, not. In this, they are no different from heterosexual acts.
There are other interesting differences between the two kinds of act. But if you think, as Rodriguez seems to, and I do, and all Catholics should, that we live in a devastated world in which no sexual acts are undamaged, free from the taint of sin and death and the concomitant need for lament, then the fact that homosexual acts have their own characteristic disorder is no ground for blindness to the goods they enshrine. Gay men should, of course, darling one another; those of us whose darlings are of the opposite sex should be glad that they do, and glad of instruction in love by the ways in which they do. Love is hard enough to come by in a devastated world without encouraging blindness to its presence.
That last sentence is an almost perfect way of putting it, made all the more heartening because the review is from First Things.
Previous Dish on Darling here. Listen to Andrew’s Deep Dish conversation with Rodriguez here.
A Space Theodicy
David Mihalyfy offers a theologically-inflected take on the film Gravity, noting that in addition to the “survival narrative” of astronauts Ryan Stone and Matt Kowalski (played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, respectively) struggling to make it back to earth, there’s another story going on:
[I]n the parallel and primary narrative of “rebirth as a possible outcome of adversity” (to use [director Alfonso] Cuaron’s words), the emotionally remote Stone works through the death of her young daughter. In what film critic Stephanie Zacharek calls “as apt and unsentimental a metaphor for prayer as I can think of,” Kowalski has to persuade Stone to keep talking during a communications blackout with Houston mission control since “if someone is listening they might just save your life.” After the two astronauts are separated, Stone in a desperate moment confesses her inability to pray since “no one ever taught me how,” but a hallucination of the dead Kowalski ends her reticence and she pours out messages for her daughter. When, finally, she is back on earth, she says a single “Thank you” as the very last words of the film.
This parallel narrative rebuts popular arguments that the existence of evil prove that there is no God. As Dawkins has written in his book, The God Delusion, attempts to “justify suffering in a world run by God” are “beyond satire.”
For Cuaron, however, the greatest unexpected gift trumps the worst unexpected evil. “Your kid died, doesn’t get any rougher than that,” the dead Kowalski tells Stone in her hallucination. But Stone’s improbable return to earth finds her renewed spiritually and thankful for her life.
Mihalyfy doesn’t quite make this explicit, but what he’s doing in this essay nicely connects to how I would argue religious people, especially Christians, should grapple with the problem of evil and suffering.
On the one hand, there’s the perennial temptation to try to explain the ways of God to men, to produce a philosophical or theological argument that somehow squares the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving God with the tragedies and hardships, both great and small, we see and experience. Some of these arguments are more persuasive than others, but they tend to leave me cold. They often seem to rely, at least implicitly, on an understanding of the divine that makes God a bigger, more powerful version of ourselves – when we ask why God “allows” evil in the world, we impose a model of choice and decision onto God that’s extracted from our own experiences. God figures in these debates like a character in one of those ethics problems you encounter in an introductory philosophy course, which is exactly the kind of anthropomorphism classical theism strives to avoid. Note how Dawkins, in the quote above, writes that God “runs” the universe, as if God were a CEO or president. As Mihalyfy asks in his essay, “Of all people, who better than an astronaut to understand that there is not a physical God sitting up somewhere in the sky?”
The better question, then, is not why does God permit suffering, but how do we respond to it? What resources do we – whether religious or not – have to deal with suffering when it inevitably comes? The Christian answers by pointing to Jesus, the suffering servant. The Christian God is a God who suffered with us and for us in the person of Jesus, who knows in full what it means to experience pain, loneliness, anguish, and death. And, even more, in the mysterious accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, we are told that suffering does not have the final word. This does not really “make sense” of suffering, but it does make Christianity a faith that has solidarity with, and deep compassion for, those who suffer at its core. It means that Christians can say to sufferers that they are understood and loved in the midst of their suffering, not just by those around them, but by God – and that this understanding and love is not the mere whim or benevolence certain people might choose to exhibit, but acts of mercy that point to what is ultimately deepest and truest about our existence.
Here’s one more passage from Mihalyfy, a gloss on Stone’s gratitude at the end of the film:
As the script specifies, Stone “drags herself from the water, like the first amphibious life form crawling out of the primordial soup onto land.” After she stands, she looks around, and then, as the music swells in a major key, she tilts her head upward. The camera-shot from below emphasizes Stone staring into the heavens. Yes, evolution exists, Cuaron communicates, but when the odd phenomenon of life is comprehended by the life-form that has become sentient, the fact that there is life at all confirms the activity of a benevolent God.
The Christian vision is one in which suffering is real and terrible but not, ultimately, the deepest element of our lives. Our hope is that there’s a goodness and love more enduring than our trials and tribulations that, paradoxically, suffering actually can reveal. This is not to claim Gravity is a “Christian” film – indeed, Milhalfy notices that both Christian and Buddhist imagery figures in the movie. Instead, it seems that spiritual resources – something like prayer, especially – allow Ryan Stone to endure suffering, and to cultivate gratitude for her life despite such suffering. I’m far more interested in how that actually happens, how faith and spirituality can connect with the suffering person to allow them to move forward and live, than I am in debating the theodicy problem with atheists whose view of God is as crude as the fundamentalists they so frequently deride.
In The Beginning, There Was…
Dreher gives the gravitational waves discovery a theological gloss, baiting his secularist readers:
There was nothing, and then, in an instant, there was something. It’s almost like somebody created the cosmos out of nothing.
UPDATE: Um, guys, I know this doesn’t prove God’s existence, or that God created the universe, etc. Let me state here without fear of contradiction that I do not believe science can ever prove such a thing, though astrophysics and cosmology can make (and is making, I think) belief in an intelligent designer more credible.
Leslie A. Wickman backs him up:
The prevalent theory of cosmic origins prior to the Big Bang theory was the “Steady State,” which argued that the universe has always existed, without a beginning that necessitated a cause. However, this new evidence strongly suggests that there was a beginning to our universe. If the universe did indeed have a beginning, by the simple logic of cause and effect, there had to be an agent – separate and apart from the effect – that caused it. That sounds a lot like Genesis 1:1 to me: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.”
So this latest discovery is good news for us believers, as it adds scientific support to the idea that the universe was caused – or created – by something or someone outside it and not dependent on it.
But Danny Faulkner is skeptical:
First, this announcement may be improperly understood and reported. For instance, in 2003 proof for cosmic inflation was incorrectly reported and a similar erroneous claim was made last year. Second, the predictions that are being supposedly confirmed are very model-dependent: if the model changes, then the predictions change. Inflation is just one of many free parameters that cosmologists have at their disposal within the big bang model, so they can alter these parameters at will to get the intended result. Third, other mechanisms could mimic the signal being claimed today. So, even if the data are confirmed, there may be some other physical mechanism at play rather than cosmic inflation.
Hemant Mehta mocks Faulkner’s conclusions:
In summary, 1) the scientists might be wrong, 2) Science changes so we can’t trust it, 3) God may have caused the thing the scientists are talking about.
Which, let’s face it, are [creationists'] explanations for damn near everything. It’s an evasion of how scientific theories work, which parts of the experiment Faulkner thinks the scientists got wrong, and the usual admission that something else (hint: God) could’ve provided the same results a few thousand years ago. Creationism: Proof that you can always deny that which you don’t understand.
Previous Dish coverage of the findings here, here, and here.
Face Of The Day
Alyssa Coppleman captions:
Austin-based Sandy Carson has been photographing bands professionally for eight years, and being that he is based in “the Live Music Capital of the World,” he’s had his fair share of slogging through the pit, camera in hand, to capture many famous and lesser-known bands that have played at SXSW, Fun Fun Fun Fest, Austin City Limits, and the hundreds of shows happening year-round. Carson’s new series, We Were There, features photographs not of the bands but of the crowds—those most dedicated fans who shove themselves to the front to be as close as possible to the show.
In an interview last year, Carson explained his thought process while shooting:
I think, like all photographers we all have little subconscious alarm bells that go off when we see potential photographs depending on what we have trained our eyes to pick up on due to our influences. I’m definitely drawn to ironic and humerous juxtapositions, characters and really banal social landscapes that are often jaundiced, so I’m told.
See more pictures from the series here.
(Photo by Sandy Carson)
March 22, 2014
Drinking And Droning
Last week, Minnesota’s Lakemaid brewery launched a drone delivery system for beer. The FAA was quick to can the idea:
While the agency technically doesn’t forbid drone delivery, it does have a set of very precise and strict regulations for unmanned aerial devices (UAVs). For example, drones are to remain below 400 feet and cannot fly over populated areas. Furthermore, anything weighing more than 25 kilos may not be used for commercial purposes. Unfortunately, Lakemaid beer violates each one of these rules. Consequently, Lakemaid has been slapped with a cease and desist order and is under the watchful gaze of the FAA. For now, the project will no doubt be grounded, unless of course the brewers intend to intentionally break the law.
But take heart, beer lovers — the future probably contains flying alcohol. The FAA intends to review its restrictions, which could potentially change some of the laws surrounding UAV delivery as early as 2015. However, it won’t be straightforward. Specific flight training would be required for those interested in using drones for the purposes of delivery, which would ultimately necessitate a special drone licence. What’s more, larger commercial uses will no doubt be prioritised over the delivery of beer. Things like UAV-managed agriculture and medical supplies could vastly improve the lives of many in society, whereas beer probably won’t.
Nymphomaniac Mania
Nymphomaniac, the third installment of Lars von Trier’s Depression trilogy, opened in theaters this weekend (and is available on demand here):
The smut in question involves Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a woman who’s found lying beaten and bruised in an alleyway by nearby resident Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård). Taken back to his apartment where she gets into bed, she recounts, over the course of both volumes, the erotic adventures of her life: her early days trawling train cars with her friend looking to see who can screw the most men (the prize: a bag of chocolates); her recurring encounters with Jerome ([Shia] LaBeouf), the man to whom she lost her virginity; her juggling numerous lovers a night; and her eventual frigidness and subsequent career as a criminal debt collector. Joe is a self-professed nymphomaniac, and her story is of alternately embracing and struggling against her “dirty, filthy lust.”
Will Leitch praises von Trier as “a beautiful lunatic”:
The movie is ostensibly a look at a lifelong nymphomaniac (played by Gainsbourg as an adult and newcomer Stacy Martin as a younger woman) telling the story of her life and her addiction to an academic named Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) who finds her in the street. That’s not what it’s really about, though: It’s about von Trier, as always, exorcising his personal demons in plain view, in the most over-the-top, lunatic ways as possible. If you take a step back from it and realize that von Trier is essentially filming sex shows with Hollywood actors and having them do horrible things to each other and occasionally showing two-minute montages of flaccid penises, and he’s doing all this to let us know he feels lonely a lot and wonders if maybe he’s a bad person … it’s sort of the most insane thing in the world. Fortunately: He’s so, so good at it. Von Trier is an idiot, but, you know, the genius kind.
David Denby finds the film best when it’s “bookish and artificial”:
Von Trier links his hungry woman to philosophical ideas, mathematics, digressions of all sorts. Sex, it turns out, is meaningless without interpretation. The character has only one way of experiencing her life; the director has many ways of telling it. He gives us a catalogue of male members belonging to Joe’s lovers, and, in medical-textbook mode, drawings and photographs of female genitalia. However profane, “Nymphomaniac” is a modern variant of illustrated seventeenth-century books of miscellaneous erudition, like “Angler” or Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” and of such eighteenth-century libertine texts as the Marquis d’Argens’s “Thérèse Philosophe”—a volume in which the sexual “education” of the heroine gets interrupted by discourses on the truth of philosophical materialism and the falsity of religion.
But Eric Sasson isn’t impressed:
I suspect that von Trier, like many of his European counterparts, views American sexual mores as fairly puritanical. And yet there’s something awfully retrograde about a film which offers us a nymphomaniac only to have a man defend her. For all the talk of Nymphomaniac being a “shocking” film from a “radical” director, von Trier’s depictions of a woman incapable of enjoying sex and despising her sexuality are fairly conventional. A truly novel film would star a sexually adventurous woman, not devoid of love and compensating for her lack of it, not hating herself, but instead embracing her sexuality and feeling content with her decisions.
Lindy West isn’t sold either:
I’m not wholly certain that woman-as-sexually-compulsive-cypher is a thought experiment new enough or true enough to bother undertaking. I didn’t hate it and I didn’t love it and I wasn’t scandalized in the ways I expected (this much explicit sex becomes mundane—by design, I expect); Nymphomaniac just feels like a slightly tedious and under-justified art film. Like American Apparel Ad: The Movie—long on the male gaze and short on female humanity; long on self-importance and short on meaning.
Andrew O’Hehir is split:
I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece or a failure; it’s a thrilling, uproarious visual and intellectual journey that doesn’t always connect and surely will not please every viewer, but along the way breaks free of all established notions about what a respectable movie is and how it’s supposed to behave. Von Trier sometimes writes awkward lines of dialogue for Joe, where she speaks all too obviously for his political or philosophical views. He also creates episodes of brilliant verbal repartee, ludicrous slapstick comedy and piercing emotional power, often overlapping. Arguably “Nymphomaniac” has way too much sex, but isn’t that the point? The most intimate, most transcendent and most liberating of human experiences is also a commodity, an unquenchable cultural obsession and an incurable addiction.
Liquid Comedy?
Wayne Curtis investigates whether drinking can make you funnier. He looks to an experiment by Joel Warner and Peter McGraw, authors of The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny:
The instructions to the subjects were straightforward: Come up with a gag. Have a drink. Repeat. After each round, the subjects [all from the creative team at Grey New York, an advertising firm] were asked to rate their drunkenness on a seven-point scale ranging from “sober” to “shit-faced.” (McGraw admits that his study “will never make its way into a peer-reviewed journal.”) They were also asked to rate their own jokes, on a scale of “slightly amusing” to “hilarious.” The jokes were later judged independently by a sober online panel.
The experiment was designed in part to test McGraw’s “benign violation” theory of humor, one in a long line of attempts to offer a universal explanation of what circumstances make us laugh. McGraw theorizes that humor arises when something “wrong, unsettling, or threatening” overlaps with a safe, nonthreatening context. So somebody falling down the stairs (violation) is funny, but only if the person lands unhurt (benign). Slapping is funny; stabbing is not. A faux-clueless Sarah Silverman saying racist things is funny; a drunk and hostile Mel Gibson is not. Each gag the Grey New York folks created was to take the form of a Venn diagram illustrating benign violation. Among the early contributions were two circles labeled “Grandpa” and “Erection,” the overlap of which was deemed “funny.”
The results?
“Drinking reduces inhibition,” McGraw says. “But it opens the door to failure, with failure likely to be on the side of going too far.” In the end, only three of the ad folks lasted for five stiff drinks at the Hurricane Club before they decided to call it quits. Among the final gags was a Venn diagram with “cancer” in one circle and “unpoppable pimple” in the other. The creator rated it hysterical. The online panel, not so much. “As people became more intoxicated, they thought they were funnier, but a sober audience didn’t see it that way,” Warner notes.
Taming The Rebel Music
Hisham Aidi’s Rebel Music looks at hip-hop, Islam, and international diplomacy:
The 9/11 attacks brought a new dimension to the relationship between Islam and hip-hop. In December 2001, John Walker Lindh, a young American, was found behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. Just how did this middle-class boy from Marin County end up joining the Taliban? His online postings, analysts argued, offered a clue: in hip-hop chat rooms, Lindh often posed as black, adopting the name Doodoo or Prof J. “Our blackness does not make white people hate us, it is THEIR racism that causes the hate,” he once wrote. Experts traced Lindh’s path to Afghanistan back to his mother taking him, at age 12, to see Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X, after which he read Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X and began listening to hip-hop. After this episode, American and European officials began to speak of rap’s potential to radicalize.
In the mid-2000s, amid the Abu Ghraib scandal and the resurgence of the Taliban, the State Department recast hip-hop as a tool rather than just a threat. Karen Hughes, then undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, launched an initiative called Rhythm Road and sent “hip-hop envoys”—rappers, dancers, DJs—abroad. The tours have since covered the broad arc of the Muslim world, stretching from Senegal and Ivory Coast, across North Africa and the Middle East, to Mongolia, Pakistan, and Indonesia. As part of a campaign costing $1.5 million per year, the artists stage performances and hold workshops; those who are Muslim speak to local media about what it’s like to practice Islam in the U.S. The trips aim not only to exhibit the integration of American Muslims, but also, according to planners, to promote democracy and foster dissent. In 2010, after one such performance in Damascus, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described hip-hop as a “chess piece” in the “multi-dimensional chess” game that is “cultural diplomacy.”
Yet the result, writes Aidi in an excerpt from his book, was often a patronizing interpretation of what fell under the umbrella of acceptability:
[W]hen in April 2007 the [British] Home Office introduced Prevent, an initiative to stop British Muslim youth from being lured into violent extremism, it made sure that hip-hop figured prominently. Muslim organizations in Britain would receive Prevent funding to organize “Spittin’ Light” hip-hop shows, where American and British Muslim rappers with “mainstream interpretations” of Islam would parade their talents. The initiative was directed at younger Muslims, who may not have been associated with mosques or other religious institutions. Prevent’s advocates claim that art can provide Muslims with “an acceptable outlet for strong emotions.” Given Prevent’s involvement in the arts, leaders of cultural organizations—wooed by the American embassy and the British government—are unsure of whether to accept state funds.
“Art is inspiring, art can create conversations that we can’t have in real life, and Muslim artists should be allowed to speak about anything,” says Hassan Mahmadallie, a theater director and officer of the Arts Council of England. “But Prevent is in effect putting limits on the speech of Muslim artists, funding only those the government considers ‘good’ Muslims.”
I wish we had statistics on how successful these programs are. They strike me as somewhat counterproductive: one of the chief complaints levied against the West by purveyors of radical Islamic ideology, after all, is that we try to export our norms onto Muslim-majority countries. Would a youth drawn to that kind of rhetoric be more incensed if he found out the British or American government was purposefully pushing another brand of Islam? Would that push someone on the edge further to the extreme?
In 2007, we covered the Muslim punk rock scene – which Andrew dubbed a type of “South Park Islam” – here.
(Video: Members of the Vice Verse All Stars discuss their participation in the Rhythm Road program in 2010)
Raw Fish And Red Tape
Eveline Chao notes that health inspectors in major cities tend to come down hardest on ethnic eateries. For example, in New York City:
Chinatown’s 293 restaurants paid $600,000 in inspection-related fines from July 2012 to March 2013, versus $30.3 million paid citywide – a disproportionately high amount for such a small community, according to Rada Tarnovsky the president of Letter Grade Consulting (LGC), a company that helps restaurants navigate the grading scheme. … Chinatown is not the only community disproportionately affected by the grading system. A Huffington Post analysis found that the percentage of Chinese, Indian, Korean, Latin American, and African restaurants with grades below A hovered around the 30s. Worse, 54 percent of Pakistani restaurants and 58 percent of Bangladeshi restaurants scored as such. (It’s worth noting that Department of Health’s online food protection course is available only in English, Spanish, and Chinese.)
In addition to language barriers, Chao sees at root “a larger clash between tradition and bureaucracy”:
Elizabeth Meltz, Mario Batali’s food safety overseer, told the New York Times that she has dealt with inspectors who seemed unfamiliar with kimchi, which is literally spoiled cabbage but safe to eat. Raw fish is an issue in Japanese restaurants, as is glove wearing, or the lack thereof. Many chefs refuse to wear them, though they are required to, because the latex taste gets into the fish and it’s hard to do fine knife work in gloves. “There are some very clean sushi practices that will knock you from an A to a B, and if the chef is particularly inflexible about deviating from what they think is the best sushi in the world, you could have a really good sushi restaurant with a B,” said Dave Arnold, the food science expert. And kosher bakeries, for their part, get fined for food handlers without beard restraints.
Mental Health Break
In honor of World Water Day, a bit of animation made entirely with water drops:
Andrew Sullivan's Blog
- Andrew Sullivan's profile
- 153 followers
